South KoreaManufacturing2022 – ongoingNeovision
AI vision inspection of contact lenses at the Osong factory
Korean lens maker Neovision says AI inspection cut its final defect rate from about 1% to about 0.01%
Problem
Workers at Neovision inspected lenses by eye, about 3,000 a day each, and the pass-or-fail standard shifted with each worker's skill and fatigue. An in-house semi-automatic magnifier lifted output to about 10,000 lenses a day, but the final defect rate stayed near 1%.
Approach
The company was picked for the Ministry of SMEs and Startups smart factory programme about three years before a December 2025 interview and began adopting AI then. Its third-generation vision system was trained on more than 1 million defect records. Herald Economy did not name the partner that built it.
Results
Takeaway
A plant of about 70 people reported both higher inspection throughput and a lower defect rate after replacing visual checks. The figures are the company vice president's account.
Categories
- Size
- Small business
- Industry
- Manufacturing
- Business function
- Production and quality
- Innovation type
- Process innovation
- AI technology
- Computer vision
- Adoption
- Government support program
- Evidence
- Company's own claim
Sources
Source summaries
Herald Economy interviewed Neovision's vice president at the Osong plant in Cheongju. He described three inspection stages: by eye at about 3,000 lenses a day, a semi-automatic magnifier at about 10,000, and AI vision at about 25,000 per worker. He gave the defect rate as about 1% before and about 0.01% after. The factory has about 70 staff and is expected to pass 100, and he said AI had not cut jobs.
Full details are in the original sources.