360° Conten Production Systems

Picture Instruments (PI) offers product photography and videography solutions for a wide range of industries. Our focus on software development allows us to deliver automated solutions to match any customer requirement. From apparel to electronics to commercial vehicles, our clients produce ready to use sales and marketing media using PI systems.

We work with manufacturers, distributors, online marketplaces and even individual stores that want to have the most accurate digital representations of what they build and sell. With modular options that cover a wide range of sizes and weights, our systems help photographers maximize creative productivity and efficiency.

A key innovation is the integration of artificial intelligence (AI) into the media creation process. The AI is able to recognize details in an image, process them and export. This can be used for things like automated detail highlights, metadata creation and quality control.

Our most recent USP is using AI to detect details and to process them individually within a fully automated process. For each customer and for each industry, different product details are important to present. Therefore, we offer our customers to train the neural network individually according to their requirements.This is unique to the market. Individual details are not always in the same place in an image and sometimes do not appear at all. This means a fully automated shooting process has to use machine learning. Our AI knows where to look and what to detect. As a result sales-promoting detail shots can now be presented to the customer without increasing time-to-market.

As an example, one of our clients captures shoes at a high volume. For them, information about the brand and model is important to highlight. But this can be difficult. Some shoes have printed logos, some have product info sewn in and others may only have subtle text molded into the sole and the logos are always in a different place. These details can be identified using AI and the corresponding information can be prepared as a detailed image. If a garment has special surface properties such as Gore-Tex, the logo can be recognized as well. This added value can significantly increase the customer's willingness to buy without needing to be identified and called out manually. Likewise in Automotive sales, there are signets and lettering that indicate special equipment packages or trim levels. So often, online shoppers default to scrolling through an image gallery rather than reading through an exhaustive equipment list. If every value add is not visually conveyed it may be missed.

One of our clients transports, reconditions, repairs and accessorizes cars. As a part of this workflow they capture high quality images for internal use and for distribution to their clients. Due to the volume of their operation they required a system that could process over a hundred vehicles per shift without multiple photographers. Also, due to physical constraints at their plant, they need only one vehicle to be processed at a time. The system communicates with existing plant equipment while integrating easily into the network and web services already in use by the customer. The result is a 2x reduction in processing time per vehicle while producing up to 10x the quantity of images and video footage. Our client has been able to expand their product offerings while decreasing damage liability due to exhaustive visual documentation.

Two years after initial installation we are working on more AI features to expand their image set. The goal is to increase the value of the content being produced without changing any of the process. The client will introduce this as a part of a new package paired with 360 interactive tours (something we also offer.)

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