This, "through AI, will allow predicting the interior texture" of that same marble, "anticipating the colors and designs of the veins that the slabs may present after being cut", IST explained today, in a statement.

"This functionality will revolutionize the global marble market, placing Portuguese business groups that compete in it at the forefront worldwide", it stated.

The work, for now, is taking place "on a laboratory scale" at the Galrão Group factory, in Pero Pinheiro, in the municipality of Sintra (Lisbon), but with two marble quarries in Alentejo, one in the municipality of Estremoz and the other in Pardais, in the neighboring municipality of Vila Viçosa, in the district of Évora.

The project, financed by community funds, namely the Recovery and Resilience Plan (PRR), also involves the groups A. Bento Vermelho and Marmocazi, which have "large quarries" in that Alentejo area, and two technology companies specialized in natural stone.

Speaking to the Lusa agency, Paulo Diniz, administrator of the Galrão Group, explained today that the laboratory testing phase underway at the company's factory should end "in 2025", with the block digitizer then being assembled in its quarries.

"At the factory, photos of mini-blocks are being taken and, then, these are sawn into mini-sheets", which "are photographed to force the algorithm to improve itself, through experience", helping it "to become more intelligent", he indicated.

In other words, "what is being developed is a system that will predict what is inside each block" of marble stone, before it is necessary to saw it into sheets.

Paulo Dinis emphasized that "the purpose" is to apply this on an industrial scale, that is, to take photographs of the faces of the marble blocks in the quarries and, "using an artificial intelligence algorithm, try to predict how the sheets will come out".

"Therefore, it is skipping a step here, because, today, we are only sure of this after sawing the block", he compared.

The administrator of the Galrão Group, who revealed that the idea is, "from 2026, to have this technology working for the market", argued that the tool will allow "saving raw material and having less waste" in the quarries.

"Portuguese marble has a very large variation and there are always surprises. Today, we do this work by experience and we take a risk, but, if we have a tool that helps us to have a greater degree of certainty, it will allow us to saw with the certainty that [the stone] is suitable for that work", he stressed.

And, in addition, the digitizer, which "for ordinary people can be described as a color 'X-ray' of stones", will also allow "taking the huge 'stock' of stone that companies have and 'transforming it into a virtual stock of sheet, without the need to saw the blocks".

"We can predict what will come out of these blocks and create a virtual catalog that, through the Internet, will be easy to make available to the world market", he stressed.

"As the visual pattern of the slabs depends on the side from which the stone is cut" this digital simulation that is being developed "will allow visualizing, with precision, the entire variety of different patterns that can be obtained from a single block", said Gustavo Paneiro, researcher and professor at DER of IST.

In this way, the clients of Portuguese natural stone companies, "be they architects, decorators or final consumers", will be able to have "at their disposal thousands and thousands of patterns in a virtual catalog" and "it will be their choice that will determine exactly how each block will be cut", he said.

A functionality that "will make the partner companies of the Instituto Superior Técnico much more efficient and, therefore, competitive in the world market for natural stone", argued the researcher, quoted in the IST statement.

Leia Também: Conselho da Europa aprova primeiro tratado internacional sobre IA (Portuguese version)

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