Images from a production line say more about a plant than it may seem: they show the product design, its defects, the production pace and sometimes the workstation itself. That is why one of the first questions in every AI inspection project is: where will our images go? In many solutions the answer leads to the vendor's cloud. In AIVQC the answer is simpler — nowhere outside your network.
This is not an add-on or a special mode. The whole platform architecture is designed so that the image, the model and the decision stay on site, and the line does not stop just because the Internet went down.
The decision is made at the station, not in the cloud
Every image is analysed locally, on the AIVQC Production station computer at the line. The model runs on the same computer that receives the camera image and sends the signal to the PLC. The result — OK, NOK, REVIEW or ERROR — is produced there and goes to the PLC from there. There is no step at which the image is sent somewhere else for assessment.
This has a practical consequence too: the station does not wait for a reply from outside. Decision time depends on the local computer and camera, not on the plant's Internet connection.
Where images and models are stored
All of the platform's working data sits on computers in your network. Each component stores only what it needs for its own job.
- Trainer — projects, datasets, annotations and training results on the engineering workstation. Training runs on that computer or on a GPU computer on the local network.
- Server — only what is operationally needed: packages on their way to stations, activation acknowledgements, publishing history and reports. Server is not a permanent photo store.
- Production — the active recipe, the previous recipe for rollback and the local inspection history with NOK images, within the retention period and storage limit you set yourself.
Images return from the line to the engineer only when someone deliberately collects them. A technician chooses which images to keep — for example only NOK or low-confidence results — and sends them through Server to an inbox in Trainer or saves them to a USB drive. After import in Trainer, the bundle is removed from Server.
The one connection that leaves the site
To be honest, the platform does have one connection to an external service. AIVQC Server can synchronize with the AIVQC Relay service to obtain the licence and signed software updates. That connection has three important properties.
- It is outbound only — Server asks Relay, never the other way round. Relay does not connect into your network, and Server needs no ports opened to the Internet.
- It carries no production data — images, datasets and models are not transferred, only the licence and updates.
- It is not needed for operation — without it, package publishing and inspection continue on the last signed licence.
Activation without Internet access
Some plants do not connect their production network to the Internet at all. For them, the licence can be activated fully offline. The administrator exports a request file from Server, passes it to AIVQC by any route, and receives a signed response file to upload back to Server. The response is single-use and bound to that specific request, so it cannot be reused or applied to another server.
Stations at the line run on their stored activation and need neither the Internet nor a constant connection to Server. When Server is temporarily unavailable, the station keeps inspecting, and results and reports wait in a local queue. A licence change never alters the result of an inspection in progress.
What IT and quality gain
- No new dependency on an external cloud — a link or vendor-service outage does not stop quality inspection.
- No ports open from the Internet — Server runs over HTTPS on the local network only.
- Full control over data retention — inspection history and NOK images stay where you keep them, for as long as you set.
- Separate identities and roles — Trainer, each station and the administrator have their own credentials, and a station cannot see another line's packages.
- Fewer audit questions — it is easier to say where the data is when it has never left the plant.
Personal data in images
An inspection camera looks at the product, but sometimes more appears in the frame: an operator's hand, a badge, a document. The rule is simple — for training we collect images of products, and images of people, badges or documents should not be collected or imported, but deleted. Keeping data on site does not remove the need to care about what goes into the training set. What data the website itself and the contact form process is described separately in the privacy policy.
If local image processing is a hard requirement for you, that is a good starting point for a pilot conversation. A pilot covers one Trainer workstation, one inspection station and up to three defect classes for 30 days, with a free extension available — and from day one it runs on your network, on your terms.