Planet AI
Expanding Human Intelligence

Better ideas are making everything simpler. Cognition was once “monopoly of the human race,” a trait that defines how we are better than computers. But today, as AI verges on achieving near perfect optimization, its potential to augment human skills is at a pivotal turning point. The capabilities that AI presents are undeniably shaping the way technology is being applied to help business operations, across almost every service industry. As such, Planet AI is a leading pioneer in the field of Cognitive Computing. In the words of Planet AI’s CTO, Welf Wustlich, “Not only do we possess sophisticated modern AI, we also have prowess in the application domain, namely in address recognition, traffic surveillance, document analysis, intelligent document analysis, and visual object detection and classification.”

With respect to startups in the AI area, Planet AI’s UVP is in their team that comprises a staggering range of experience in R&D, coming from Europe’s foremost research groups, who are leading experts in the field of machine learning for many years. It is this experience upon which the company has created its original strategy—where they have unified the different approaches in cognitive understanding and interpretation, to create a single solution that can be used for all applications and scenarios. Named Planet-Brain, this flagship product from Planet AI has a singular architecture that is trained to be used with different data; it powers computational engines that truly understand diverse content, ranging from images, videos, written and spoken texts, just as well as the social content derived from human behavior and interaction.

The engines powered by Planet-Brain have real applications out in the field. In traffic surveillance, Planet AI is the leading provider of traffic enforcement solutions in Germany, Switzerland, and Austria—applied in the surveillance back offices for processing images and videos to detect cars, number plates, and driver’s faces.

Another field of interest is in postal automation, with the U.S. Postal Service, FedEx, and many prominent companies in Europe, using Planet AI systems for tracking letters and parcels, identifying addresses to sort them automatically. In document analysis, Planet AI helps in reading historical documents for the University of Rostock’s CITlab team. It is a strong cooperation over a period of some years, wherein CITlab operates on the academic research with Planet AI team focused on the application side. Together, the pair creates solutions for those ancient documents—from 1500-1800 years ago—of European Cultural Heritage. Planet AI’s Intelligent Document Analysis (IDA), is their latest offering, focusing on markets insurance, healthcare, finance, and government for large document processing tasks. The provider has partnered with one of Germany’s largest insurance companies in reading and providing content analytics for over 300,000 paper documents daily via incoming post.

Wustlich compares Planet-Brain to a child listening to a bedtime story. Just as a child’s mind is capable of visualizing scenes from the excerpts of text being read out, so can it help in better understanding of the setting, events, and the relations between the characters in the story. “When the big bad wolf— having eaten grandma whole—is waiting for Little Red Riding Hood in the old woman’s clothes, the system employs deep encoding, comprising of recurrent neural networks and deep conventional neural networks to understand the setting, to give real-life inferences from them,” he explains.

Planet AI partners with several government and private agencies to find better and more challenging applications of their technology. Recently, Planet AI has been working with the IBM research lab in Zurich to discuss with their team on the combination of Planet AI’s technology with Watson Analytics for a new range of solutions in the future. The provider has also just recently launched an Android App bringing Planet-Brain and its capabilities to the mobile platform.