产品召回绝非小事。以2017年至2022年间所有雪佛兰Bolt车型的召回为例：LG电池工厂出现生产问题，导致部分电池组件安装不当，最终给LG造成了19亿美元的损失。
Recalls are no joke. Take the one that sidelined every Chevy Bolt made between 2017 and 2022: A problem at an LG battery factory caused some parts inside the cells to be installed improperly, which ultimately cost LG $1.9 billion.
几乎所有大型制造商都曾面临产品召回的情况。仅在电动汽车领域，大众、斯特兰蒂斯、现代、丰田等车企都经历过此类事件。
Pretty much every major manufacturer has to deal with recalls. In the EV space alone, Volkswagen, Stellantis, Hyundai, Toyota and others have all suffered through them.
“绝大多数重大质量问题其实都能通过CT扫描检测出来。之所以未能做到，是因为传统的抽样检测方式效率实在太低，”Glimpse公司的联合创始人兼首席执行官埃里克·莫赫对TechCrunch说道。
“The majority of those major quality issues could have been caught with CT scanning. And the reason why they weren’t is because it’s way too slow to do any kind of statistical sampling,” Eric Moch, co-founder and CEO of Glimpse, told TechCrunch.
为帮助企业发现更多产品缺陷，Glimpse开发了一项技术：通过大幅提升现有CT扫描仪的吞吐量，使电池制造商检查电池单元的速度提高10至30倍。莫赫表示，借助Glimpse的软件，制造商每天可扫描数万个电池单元，而目前这一数量仅为寥寥几个。他还补充道，Glimpse正与合作伙伴共同研发一款“超级扫描仪”，该设备仅需一两秒即可完成一次扫描。
To help companies find more defects, Glimpse has developed a way for battery manufacturers to inspect cells 10 to 30 times faster by significantly boosting throughput on their existing CT scanners. Using Glimpse’s software, manufacturers could scan tens of thousands of cells per day, up from the current handful, Moch said. A customer “super scanner” that Glimpse is developing with partners could complete a scan in a second or two, he added.
当然，存在昂贵缺陷的部件并不只有电池。Glimpse向TechCrunch独家透露，公司即将推出一款新产品。这款名为Explore的产品能让航空航天、汽车、电子及医疗器械行业的客户借助该公司的图像处理软件，利用实验室及研发环境中的CT扫描仪加快质量检测流程。
Batteries aren’t the only parts to suffer from costly defects, of course, so Glimpse is launching a new product, the company exclusively told TechCrunch. Called Explore, the product will let customers in industries such as aerospace, automotive, electronics and medical devices use the startup’s image processing software to speed up quality control checks using CT scanners in their labs and development environments.
莫赫称，目前Glimpse已拥有安克创新、Lucid以及美国海军等100多家客户，年收入处于七位数的中等水平。其客户既包括电池采购方，也包括电池供应商。
Glimpse currently has over 100 customers such as Anker, Lucid and the U.S. Navy, and currently generates revenue in the “mid seven-figure” range, Moch said. Customers include both buyers and sellers of batteries.
为了提升传统上运行缓慢的CT扫描仪的处理速度，这家初创公司自行开发了图像处理流程，用于压缩并优化扫描图像。该流程以深度学习算法为核心，大部分初步处理工作都是在客户现场部署的边缘计算机上完成的。“这些边缘计算机会在图像被上传至云端前完成所有繁重的处理工作，”莫赫说道。
To wring more speed out of traditionally slow CT scanners, the startup has written its own image processing pipeline, which compresses scans and cleans them up. It’s built around deep learning algorithms, and much of the initial processing happens on edge computers deployed at a customer’s site. “It does all of the heavy lifting before sending the output to the cloud,” Moch said.
据该公司介绍，图像质量的提升与压缩技术的结合使得最终生成的图像清晰明了，且能在数秒内于网页浏览器中加载出来。“用户无需再等待数分钟甚至数小时才能看到扫描数据，”他补充道。
Altogether, the combination of quality improvements and compression make for clear images that load within seconds in a web browser, the company claims. “You don’t have to wait minutes or even sometimes hours for that data to load,” he said.
除了扫描图像外，Glimpse的控制面板还能显示客户指定的零部件测量数据。以电池检测为例，系统可测量电池单元中各层之间的距离。一旦测量值偏离正常范围，Glimpse的软件便会发出警报并在扫描图像上予以标记。“客户可以亲眼看到他们所关心的缺陷，”莫赫说道。此外，这些深度学习算法还会参考客户的反馈信息，并据此不断自我优化。
Alongside scanned images, Glimpse’s dashboard will also show customers part measurements they specify. In the case of batteries, it might measure the distance between layers in a battery cell. If they start deviating from the norm, Glimpse’s software will flag it and highlight it in the scanned images. “They can see with their own eyes the defects that they care about,” Moch said. The deep learning algorithms also take into account customer input, retraining themselves along the way.
没有配备CT扫描仪的客户可将零部件寄送至Glimpse，该公司位于波士顿的扫描中心会代为完成扫描工作。据悉，Glimpse还计划在旧金山湾区开设第二家按需扫描服务中心。
Customers who don’t have their own CT scanners can ship parts to Glimpse, which will use its own CT scanner in the Boston area. The company said it is opening a second Scan On Demand center in the San Francisco Bay Area.
“我们预计这种扫描服务将拥有广阔的市场前景。客户只需花费几百或几千美元就能使用我们的服务，而无需购置价格昂贵的设备，”莫赫说道。“等到日后条件成熟时，他们再购买扫描仪并运行我们的软件即可。”
“We expect this scanning service to actually be a bigger market. You can spend a couple hundred bucks or a few thousand dollars on Glimpse, and you don’t have to buy a very expensive piece of equipment,” Moch said. “And one day, when it makes sense for you, you buy the scanner and then you run our software on top of it.”