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GE Aerospace, Waygate Technologies to Deliver new AI-assisted Commercial Jet Engine Borescope Inspection Solution to Enhance Defect Recognition
GE Aerospace and Waygate Technologies, a Baker Hughes business, announced they have jointly developed a new, AI-assisted commercial engine borescope solution that will be available to Waygate Technologies customers and introduced to GE Aerospace’s MRO network later this year. The development represents the successful completion of their first development program under a Joint Technology Development Agreement between the two companies announced in May of 2023.
Through this joint development effort, GE Aerospace provided Waygate Technologies with a comprehensive dataset of engine inspection videos, which resulted in thousands of new representative images used for training Waygate Technologies’ Gas Power-assist ADR model. GE’s Services Technology Acceleration Center (STAC) and GE Aerospace Research brought subject matter expertise to ensure accurate and complete data labeling was performed. Waygate Technologies then leveraged this data and applied cutting-edge AI techniques, including a compute-optimized, state-of-the-art object detection algorithm and a novel temporal smoothing algorithm.
Key technical advancements, as compared to the program starting point (Gas Power-assist ADR model v4.1), include:
- Increased True Positive Rate: Model recall rates realized a 33.6% increase, indicating a dramatic improvement in identifying HPC defects.
- Decreased False Positive Rate: Model precision rates realized a 13.5% increase, indicating a reduction in previous falsely identified defects. This improvement was achieved both by an increased training dataset and the temporal smoothing algorithm used for detection confirmation.
The new AI-assisted features will be integrated and available for deployment through a software update to customers for Waygate Technologies’ Mentor Visual iQ+ borescope later this year. In addition, GE Aerospace will be introducing the model to its MRO network for use in High Pressure Compressor inspections for its GEnx and CFM LEAP engines.
🧠GE, Waygate Partner On AI-Powered Engine Inspections
GE Aerospace and non-destructive testing specialist Waygate Technologies are partnering to advance engine inspection methods. The companies have signed a joint technology development agreement to develop software and hardware inspection solutions for commercial aircraft engines.
The agreement is aimed at improving the efficiency, accuracy and quality of video borescope inspections, while also minimizing costs for MRO providers. The companies will also explore the use of machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) within borescope inspections, which could improve reliability, cycle time and consistency of inspections.