This project is the continuation of the feasibility study “Vision and Artificial Intelligence for hide grading”

During the first four months of 2023, several working sessions were held to launch the second phase of the Leather Eyes project.

Leather Cluster Barcelona has driven this second stage forward following the positive results of the feasibility study “Vision and Artificial Intelligence for hide grading”, which demonstrated the viability of using this technology to grade hides.

Both the feasibility study and this second stage have received funding from ACCIÓ (Department of Enterprise and Labour), under the competitive strengthening grants for the entities that make up the Catalonia Clusters Programme 2021-2023.

Hide grading is a process carried out manually, relying on the expertise of workers with the aptitude to perform the operation for hours on end, using imaginary mental patterns to distinguish between different types and combinations of defects so that they can classify each hide into different categories (with bovine leather there are usually 5 categories plus rejects). It is a highly significant operation because of its economic impact on the business, since the cost of the hide as a raw material is usually around 50% of the total manufacturing cost.

Leather Cluster Barcelona and the company Picvisa are taking part in this second stage of the project.

The purpose of this collaborative project, with innovation as its focus and applying technology to hide grading in order to improve processes, is to make it possible to establish a mechanism that brings objectivity to the grading process, makes it more consistent, and generates evidence about the quality of the raw material purchased so as to optimise procurement.

Other potential outcomes of the project are obtaining additional data that make it possible to infer new knowledge along the value chain and introducing a subsystem that facilitates the implementation of traceability for each hide.

Leather Cluster Barcelona is an environment of competitive cooperation for promoting cross-cutting, transformative strategic projects with the aim of driving the ecosystem of the Catalan leather sector. The cluster is an entity accredited under the Catalonia Clusters programme and is supported by Acció.