School Internship at the Fraunhofer ITWM

What does a work placement at our institute look like? At best, like that of Marie Krol, who is in the eleventh grade at Gymnasium am Rittersberg in Kaiserslautern. During her internship, she tested the use of AI-generated images to visually inspect carrots.

Our »Image Processing« department uses visual inspection primarily in an industrial context, for example in the quality control of screws. But might it also be possible to use the process for food in the future? With her initial research, intern Marie Krol has carried out important preliminary work for her supervisor Petra Gospodnetic, who is enthusiastic about her independent work: »Marie's task was to use generative AI models to test whether we can use them to generate images that show typical defects, which can then be used to train an AI.«

Independently Integrated Into Comfyui

Marie is 15 years old and her subjects are mathematics, information technology and english. Her friend recommended the internship at the Fraunhofer ITWM to her, as he himself started as an intern in »image processing« and is working as a student assistant ever since. Within a few days, she had familiarized herself with ComfyUI – a tool for creating images with AI that is based on the Python programming language. And then it started: »I first created various images for practice, then just carrots with various errors – brown spots, strange shapes, all the things it would let us sort out ourselves.« She completed her task faster than Petra expected her to: »If I'm interested in something, I can spend hours on it. I wanted to be able to do that now«, says Marie.

Impulse to See More

Because she finished so quickly and the task was more in the field of Information Technology, she looked for mathematical tasks in the department on her own. »I can imagine studying mathematics or information technology, we'll see,« says Marie. Her supervisor is convinced that she definitely has the skills needed for the degree courses: »Marie was the perfect intern! She actively said what she wanted to see and do – you should definitely keep this impulse to want to see more,« is Petra's advice. For Marie, one thing is clear after the internship: »I'm looking forward to working. I'll be glad when I can work instead of going to school.«

And what will happen to the countless pictures of spoiled carrots now? Marie's conclusion was that the artificially generated images are not yet suitable for a virtual quality check – further work would be necessary for this.