BMW Group publishes open-source dataset SORDI

The BMW Group is a company that’s always at the forefront of innovation. That said, the automotive conglomerate has long embedded artificial intelligence in many facets of the group, such as vehicle production.

SORDI, or Synthetic Object Recognition Dataset for Industries, is currently the world’s largest dataset and is used by the BMW Group to streamline and significantly accelerate the training of artificial intelligence in the manufacturing and production of its vehicles.

The synthesized AI dataset consists of more than 800,000 photorealistic images which are divided into 80 categories of production resources, from pallets and pallet cages to forklifts, and include objects of particular relevance to the core technologies of automotive engineering and logistics.

In a recent press release, the BMW Group announced that it is making SORDI public. In doing so, the firm together with its partners Microsoft, NVIDIA, and Idealworks will make the world’s largest reference dataset for artificial intelligence in the field of manufacturing available to software developers and IT professionals to develop and tailor AI solutions for manufacturing. Meanwhile, production employees can use the data to maintain mature AI systems for validation purposes ready for the start of production.

“The BMW Group has been using artificial intelligence since 2019. AI has already been utilized in various quality assurance applications in production at the plants. SORDI, the new, synthetic dataset makes AI models much faster to train and AI considerably more cost-efficient in production,” said BMW Group Production System, Planning, Tool, and Plant Engineering Senior Vice President Michele Melchiorre.

The publication of the innovative dataset, said the consortium, represents the next targeted step in the BMW Group’s systematic expansion of activities to democratize artificial intelligence.

Photos from BMW Group

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