Tyre sidewall scanning technology from Anyline

Imagine technology that literally reads tyre sidewalls for you. Not barcodes. Not RFID chips, but the actual sidewall. Did I mention that it can read driving licences, number plates and VIN numbers as well? A system like this could help with every part of the distribution chain: from manufacturing to distribution and especially in retail and with fleets. That’s exactly what the Anyline system does. Tyres & Accessories experienced an in-person demonstration of the system at May’s Tire Cologne exhibition in Germany.

Arguably Anyline’s largest tyre customer at the moment is Discount Tire in the USA, but the combinations of features that the system – which is sold via a subscription-based Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model – means there are opportunities with garages, fleets and even online tyre business. In the latter case, the technology can be used as a way of assisting online shops, speeding up vehicle inspections and tyre stock-keeping processes. In addition, it will soon be able to do more than “just” recognizing tyre parameters such as width, profile, diameter and speed using OCR analysis (optical Character Recognition) of the corresponding information on the side panel.

Christian Stadlmann, Anyline’s chief revenue officer; Head of automotive business, Frédéric Baroin; and head of PR and content, Michael Wilkinson demonstrated the system in-person. The system worked rapidly and even on bad condition sidewall surfaces, something that is said to be virtue of the technology’s machine learning capabilities. In other words, the more tyres that are scanned, the better the system gets at reading tyres – in any state. According to the company representatives, there is already a lot of interest in the Anyline solution from within the market.