As part of the Liebherr household appliances division’s digital initiative, Liebherr and Microsoft are collaborating on the development of Liebherr’s new generation of the SmartDeviceBox. This is a communication module which fits into Liebherr refrigerators and freezers, connecting them to the internet. The system is designed to have a long lifecycle: Modular units can be integrated and upgraded at any time in existing SmartDevice-ready appliances to create value and comfort for customers through new digital features and solutions.
Using the deep learning algorithms contained within CNTK, Microsoft data scientists worked with Liebherr to build a new image processing system to detect specific food products present inside a Liebherr refrigerator. Starting with a general purpose computer vision model learned from millions of generic images, the Microsoft system can learn to recognize new types of objects – milk cartons, ketchup bottles, pickle jars and much more – from example images. When a new image from inside a refrigerator is provided to the newly learned model, it can detect the presence of the objects it has seen before during training.