Resources
The words we use, in plain English
Inspection, reliability, facilities and OT security each have their own vocabulary. Here are the terms that come up on this site and in our proposals, explained briefly and linked to where we use them.
A to Z
Machine vision, edge AI and reliability glossary
54 terms
- Anomaly detection
- A modeling approach that learns what normal looks like, mostly from good examples, and flags anything that departs from it. It suits rare or unpredictable defects, where collecting labeled examples of every defect type is impractical.
- BESS
- Battery energy storage system. Racks of battery modules, usually lithium-ion, with power conversion, a battery management system and HVAC, often housed in a container. Connections, busbars and cooling are common targets for thermal monitoring.
- C-mount
- A standard threaded lens mount used on industrial and scientific cameras. Interchangeable C-mount lenses let one camera body take a wide range of focal lengths and fields of view.
- Class I, Division 2
- A North American hazardous-location classification for areas where flammable gases or vapors are present only under abnormal conditions, such as a leak. Equipment installed there must be rated for the location.
- CMMS
- Computerized maintenance management system. The software that holds your asset register, work orders, maintenance schedules and spare parts; examples include IBM Maximo, SAP PM, Fiix, Limble and UpKeep.
- Condition monitoring
- Measuring signals that reflect a machine's health, such as vibration, temperature, ultrasound and motor current, and trending them so degradation is found before failure. It is the foundation of predictive maintenance.
- Confidence score
- The number a model attaches to a decision, indicating how closely the input matches what it learned. It is not a guarantee of correctness, but a gradual shift in confidence over time is an early sign of drift.
- Contribution margin
- Selling price minus the variable costs of making one unit, such as materials, energy and freight. It is the right measure of what lost output costs, because a unit you don't make also doesn't consume those inputs.
- Deflectometry
- An inspection technique for shiny surfaces in which the camera views the reflection of a known pattern, such as stripes. Dents, waves and scratches show up as distortions in the reflected pattern, even when ordinary lighting shows only glare.
- Drift
- The growing mismatch between the conditions a model was trained on and the conditions it now sees, caused by changes in lighting, materials, equipment or season. Left unchecked, it lowers detection or raises false rejects.
- Edge AI
- Running AI models on hardware at or near the machine rather than in a remote data center. Decisions happen in milliseconds, and data doesn't need to leave the site.
- Emissivity
- How effectively a surface emits infrared radiation compared with an ideal emitter, on a scale from 0 to 1. Bare, shiny metals have low emissivity and read colder than they are, so thermal measurements are taken on high-emissivity surfaces or corrected.
- Encoder
- A sensor, usually on a conveyor shaft or roller, that emits pulses as the belt moves. Vision systems use it to trigger the camera and to time the reject gate to the exact part.
- Escape
- A defective part that passes inspection and reaches the next process or the customer. Escape rates are often expressed in parts per million (ppm).
- False reject
- A good part rejected by an inspection system. False rejects waste material and capacity, and a high rate tempts operators to bypass the system altogether.
- FAT/SAT
- Factory acceptance test and site acceptance test. The FAT proves a system against its specification before it ships; the SAT proves it again after installation, on your line.
- Few-shot learning
- Training methods that let a model learn a new class from only a handful of labeled examples. Useful for defects that occur too rarely to collect hundreds of images.
- Frame-to-I/O latency
- The time from a camera capturing an image to the system setting an output, such as firing a reject gate. On a Gatepoint it is under 40 ms for typical inspection models.
- GigE Vision
- An interface standard for controlling industrial cameras and transmitting their images over Ethernet. Many cameras already installed on production lines use it, which is what makes adding AI to them practical.
- Global shutter
- A camera sensor that exposes every pixel at the same instant. It freezes moving parts without the skew that rolling-shutter sensors produce, which matters at line speed.
- Historian
- A database built for time-stamped process data, such as temperatures, pressures and machine states, collected over long periods. Perflens sends results to historians over OPC UA or MQTT.
- IEC 62443
- A series of international standards for the security of industrial automation and control systems, covering asset owners, integrators and component makers. Perflens hardware is designed in line with its component requirements in IEC 62443-4-2.
- IP67 and IP69K
- Ingress protection ratings. IP67 means dust-tight and protected against temporary immersion in water; IP69K adds protection against close-range, high-pressure, high-temperature water jets of the kind used in washdown.
- IQ/OQ/PQ
- Installation, operational and performance qualification. The three stages regulated manufacturers use to show that equipment is installed correctly, operates as specified and performs consistently in production.
- IR window
- A sealed port in a panel or switchgear door, fitted with an infrared-transparent lens, that allows thermal imaging of live equipment without removing covers.
- LWIR
- Long-wave infrared, roughly 8–14 µm in wavelength. Uncooled thermal cameras such as the Lensnode T work in this band, where objects at everyday temperatures emit strongly.
- MES
- Manufacturing execution system. Software that manages and records production orders, materials, genealogy and quality data on the shop floor.
- Microstop
- A short stop, often seconds to a few minutes, that operators clear themselves without calling maintenance. Microstops rarely get logged, which is how they hide inside a respectable OEE number.
- Model card
- A short document describing a trained model, including the data it learned from, how it was tested, its measured performance and its known limits. Every Perflens model ships with one.
- Motor current signature analysis
- Analysis of a motor's current waveform to detect electrical and mechanical problems, such as broken rotor bars, misalignment or load changes. Measurements are taken at the panel rather than at the machine.
- MQTT
- A lightweight publish-and-subscribe messaging protocol widely used in industrial IoT. Devices publish data to a broker, and any authorized system can subscribe to it.
- Multispectral and hyperspectral imaging
- Imaging in several discrete wavelength bands (multispectral) or many narrow, contiguous bands (hyperspectral), beyond what the eye sees as color. Materials with the same visible color can differ in spectral response, which makes these methods useful for sorting and foreign-material detection.
- OEE
- Overall equipment effectiveness, calculated as availability × performance × quality. It expresses how much of a machine's potential output in its planned time it actually delivers as good product.
- ONNX
- Open Neural Network Exchange, an open file format for machine-learning models. Models exported as ONNX can run on other hardware and software runtimes, which is why we export to it.
- OPC UA
- An open, platform-independent standard for secure industrial data exchange, with an information model that describes what each value means. It is widely supported by PLCs, SCADA, MES and historians.
- OTA update
- Over-the-air update, meaning software, firmware or model updates delivered to devices over the network. Gatepoint uses A/B partitions, so an update installs alongside the running version and can be rolled back if it fails.
- PLC
- Programmable logic controller, the industrial computer that runs a machine's control logic. A vision system hands each result to the PLC, which decides what happens to the part.
- PoE
- Power over Ethernet, which carries power and data on one cable. PoE+ (IEEE 802.3at) supplies up to 30 W per port, enough to power a Lensnode camera without a separate supply.
- Radiometric thermal imaging
- Thermal imaging in which every pixel carries a calibrated temperature value, not just a shade of color. Radiometric data can be trended, alarmed and compared over time.
- Reject gate
- The actuator that removes a failed part from the line, such as an air blast, pusher or diverter. Its timing is driven by the encoder and the PLC.
- SBOM
- Software bill of materials, a machine-readable list of every software component and version in a product. It lets you check quickly whether a newly published vulnerability affects a device.
- Secure boot
- A startup process in which each stage verifies the cryptographic signature of the next, so a device runs only software its maker has signed.
- Shadow mode
- Running a new model or system alongside the existing process and recording its decisions without acting on them. Its performance is measured before it is trusted with the reject gate.
- Sparkplug B
- A specification for MQTT that defines topic names, payload encoding and device state through birth and death messages, so industrial systems can interpret each other's data without custom mapping.
- Stack light
- The column of colored lamps on a machine that shows its state at a glance. Gatepoint digital outputs can drive one to show inspection or alert status.
- Synthetic data
- Images generated by rendering or generative models rather than captured by a camera. For rare defects, synthetic examples can broaden a training set, provided they are validated against real samples.
- TOPS
- Trillions of operations per second, a headline measure of an AI accelerator's peak arithmetic throughput, usually quoted at low precision such as INT8. It is a poor predictor of real model speed, which also depends on memory bandwidth and software.
- TPM (Total Productive Maintenance)
- A maintenance philosophy that involves operators in the routine care of their own equipment and attacks losses systematically, often tracked through OEE.
- TPM (Trusted Platform Module)
- A dedicated security chip that stores cryptographic keys and records measurements of the software that boots. Every Gatepoint includes a TPM 2.0.
- Ultrasound monitoring
- Listening for sound above the range of human hearing to find compressed-air leaks, failing steam traps and early bearing lubrication problems. The Pulsenode U covers 20–100 kHz.
- Unified namespace
- An architecture in which plant systems publish their data into one structured, event-driven hierarchy, often on an MQTT broker. Other systems subscribe to it instead of building point-to-point links.
- Vibration spectrum (FFT)
- A chart of vibration amplitude by frequency, calculated from the raw waveform with a fast Fourier transform. Imbalance, misalignment, looseness and bearing defects each leave characteristic patterns at specific frequencies.
- VLM
- Vision-language model, a model that takes images and text together and answers in natural language. In Perflens systems a VLM explains and triages, while deterministic inspection models make the pass/fail decision.
- Zones and conduits
- The IEC 62443 method for segmenting an industrial network. Assets with similar security needs are grouped into zones, and every communication path between zones runs through a defined conduit.
A term we haven't defined?
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