Unlocking the potential of Computer Vision (CV) for SMEs -- Development of an AI platform enabling non-technical users to build advanced CV applications

**为中小企业释放计算机视觉的潜力-开发一个人工智能平台，使非技术用户能够构建高级简历应用程序**视觉图像中蕴含着大量有用的信息和价值，然而，计算机视觉专业知识的高昂成本以及分析和整理数据所需的时间，意味着英国中小企业目前不可能充分发挥其潜力。从帮助医生诊断医疗条件，到无人机检测作物病害，再到确保建筑工地的安全协议，计算机视觉具有释放各种行业新的增长和效率机会的潜力。不幸的是，中小企业很少拥有所需的简历专业知识，雇佣/签约这些专家的成本可能高得令人望而却步。即使在那时，高技能的简历科学家仅在数据管理上就花费了大约80%的时间\[3\]，而他们缺乏领域专业知识，从而导致表现不佳、无法使用的模型\[4，5\]。这些挑战导致55%的项目无法投入生产[3]。为了提高采用率，解决方案需要加快数据管理流程，降低管理成本，并使未经技术培训的人更容易访问。医院和制造商等组织既拥有海量的视觉数据，又拥有解读这些数据的领域专业知识，这使它们处于创建有影响力的简历申请的理想位置。使他们能够构建自己的应用程序有助于加快人工智能的采用和带来的好处。Metalynx与伦敦国王学院的医学成像专家和视网膜成像SME Optos合作，旨在通过轻松开发可访问的工具来构建高级CV应用程序，消除采用的关键障碍--成本和专业知识--从而显著提高英国中小企业对CV的采用率。该项目的最终目标是为中小企业开发一种易于使用、低成本的CV技术堆栈，可用于创建高级应用程序，无需任何技术培训，并且可以无缝集成到现有工作流程中，以释放已收集数据的价值。

**Unlocking the potential of Computer Vision for SMEs - Development of an AI platform enabling non-technical users to build advanced CV applications**There is a significant amount of useful information and value locked in visual images, however the high cost of computer vision expertise and the time it takes to analyse and curate the data, means it's currently impossible for UK SMEs to fully realise its potential.From helping doctors diagnose medical conditions, to detecting crop disease by drones, to ensuring safety protocols on construction sites, computer vision has the potential to unlock new growth and efficiency opportunities across a wide variety of sectors.Unfortunately SMEs rarely have the CV expertise required, and the cost to hire/contract this expertise can be prohibitively expensive. Even then highly-skilled CV scientists are spending ~80% of their time on data curation alone\[3\], with their lack of domain expertise then leading to underperforming, unusable models\[4,5\]. Such challenges result in 55% of projects never making it to production\[3\].To increase adoption, solutions need to speed-up data curation processes, reduce curation costs and become more accessible to those without technical training. Organisations such as hospitals and manufacturers own both vast amounts of visual data and the domain expertise to interpret it, making them ideally placed to create impactful CV applications. Empowering them to build their own application can help accelerate AI-adoption and the resulting benefits.Collaborating with medical imaging experts at King's College London and retinal imaging SME Optos, Metalynx aims to significantly increase CV adoption amongst UK SMEs by removing the key barriers to adoption -- cost and expertise -- through the development of accessible tools to build advanced CV applications, easily.The ultimate aim of the project is to develop an easy to use, low cost CV technology stack for SMEs that can be used to create advanced applications, without any technical training and can seamlessly integrate into existing works flows to unlock value in already collected data.