What we learned from a conversation with David Tran, CEO of Optelos. Get even more insight from their recent whitepaper, Optimizing Oil and Gas Asset Inspections; Going Beyond Drone Images to Achieve Real Results.

The amount of data enterprises are collecting is outpacing their capabilities for analyzing and using that data for insights and decision making. Advances in visual data capture—technologies like drones or robots—have made the collection of visual data much easier and much more cost efficient than ever before. 

At the same time, enterprises are under increasing pressure to proactively monitor and manage risk, which really drives the need for more frequent asset inspection. The volume of inspections and inspection data has increased exponentially. 

Companies are struggling with managing, processing and analyzing all the visual data they’re collecting. They're still relying on traditional data management approaches and platforms—like folders and files—that, frankly, were never designed to handle visual data workflow.

The Basics of Visual Data Management

When Optelos talks about visual data management, it boils down to a few key elements.

First, you have to intelligently store and manage the massive data set. This means creating a single source of truth to allow data to be processed, accessed, and shared across the organization—eliminating different data silos.

Next, once the data is processed, you have to have a way to provide the information to stakeholders to allow them to visualize and act on it all in a single platform. It has moved beyond just having images and videos. You have to take that information and correlate it with complex 3D models, large detailed orthomosaic maps, panoramas, CAD drawings, and many other formats that are important for the whole inspection process. And it all has to tie together to provide rich context to deliver insights.

Next, this massive amount of data requires rapid analysis. There's much more data than can be processed manually, so the power of AI and computer vision helps accelerate and automate the analysis of this information.

Finally, companies need a way to operationalize the data. What that means is they have to ensure that it's easily shareable across the entire organization and can ultimately integrate into dispatch systems, business intelligence systems, asset report management systems, and more to work together in a cohesive workflow.

What Makes Visual Data Different?

Data collected from drones and robots tends to be very massive compared to other data types. We're talking about huge amounts of videos that are oftentimes tens of megabytes in size and 4K videos that tend to be gigabytes in size. Managing all of this data, millions of files every day, is very, very overwhelming.

Visual data also tends to be very complex and unstructured. In other words, it's very hard to search and really hard to extract information from the raw files. So what happens is organizations tend to have to manually figure out how to extract all this rich information, what we call metadata, and then continue to figure out how to correlate and understand the relationships between that metadata. That's a very complex process.

It's also really hard to share visual information at scale. Since the data comes in unstructured, it's massive and in these weird formats—images, videos, 3D data and maps, and CAD drawings. Unless there's really an effective way to share all this information in what we call a single pane of glass, a lot of this information just goes wasted because you can't effectively analyze and share those across the organization.

Why Enterprises Are Using Visual Data

From industrial manufacturers to utilities, enterprises are undergoing a massive digital transformation process to leverage emerging technologies to infuse safety, efficiency, and automation into their assets, especially workflows. 

These companies want to do asset inspections more often. This allows them to form continuous inspection and to set up talent base, which allows them to get a lot more insights from their assets over time.  They also want to increase the number of checks they do per inspection to yield higher quality without adding more manpower or more time to the process.

Companies also want to improve safety and compliance. This is really becoming a big topic in the industry. They can do that through the automation of the inspection process, the workflows, and visual data.

And ultimately, companies want to avoid critical failures. This means being able to identify issues—such as degrading asset conditions—early on and being able to dispatch to the field to avoid these failures before they become service-impacting. 

By providing the ability for near-time visualization and analytics, Optelos helps companies meet these goals and better answer questions such as what condition is the asset in, what is the relationship to other assets, what actions are required for this asset, as well as many other questions all in a unified and scalable workflow.

Visual Data from Unmanned Assets in Energy

Engineering services companies and asset inspection companies in the energy industry—for example, Liberty Flare—are starting to use more and more drones and robots in their inspection services, and quickly realizing the need for enterprise data management platforms. These companies must provide these results in a professional and elegant platform to their customers—more than just, "Hey, I'm going to ship you a USB drive or a hard disk." They want to have an immersive platform to share this information.

That's where Optelos comes in. They help engineering companies like Liberty provide a uniquely branded platform where they can manage inspection data from drones as well as non-drone data. The companies are able to share and deliver information in an immersive experience for their customers, beyond just static reports. 

Years ago, it was, "Here's a PDF of the result," and now with solutions like Optelos, enterprises can create a very immersive environment. The inspection data can be combined with 3D reality models where you can drill down from a high level all the way down to the asset component, and see all those results, quickly see relationships between the data, and deliver those insights in a single pane of glass.

Wondering how to get meaningful results from your drone program? With Optelos you can better manage all your collected data, correlate that data to existing asset data and inspection reports to identify and geolocate critical asset conditions, speeding mitigation actions, Turnarounds, Flare Stack inspections, Corrosion Detection, Corrosion Under Insulation (CUI), Routing Pipeline Assets, can all be improved by intelligently interpreting your collected data and putting that information in the hands of the right people. Download Optelos’ latest whitepaper now.

About Optelos

According to CEO David Tran, you can think of Optelos as the center of gravity for visual data. It helps enterprises by providing a unified visual data management and AI analytic solution that helps them elegantly store, organize, analyze, and collaborate to deliver actionable answers at scale.

Optelos started about four years ago with the belief that the intelligent interpretation of visual data can empower customers to deliver better business outcomes. Its mission is to enable customers to rapidly identify and remediate critical asset issues through the power of visual data. Optelos helps that happen through its patented (US patent #10,418,068) geo-visual data management, data visualization, and AI-powered analytic software platform.

The information in this post came from an InnovateEnergy Executive Q&A. To get access to events and conversations like this, make sure you subscribe (it’s free!) to the InnovateEnergy community.