Innomatic's SmartVision ensures error-free quality control

Customer challenge

Food products with a different shape or color: for food companies, these are losses they would rather not see. Employing personnel to check quality is often not feasible because of the speed of the production process. Often the error rate is also too high.

The solution

To monitor the quality of products throughout the production process, Innomatic deploys smart cameras. These can check the size, shape and color of products, as well as detect contaminants. Faulty products can be removed manually or automatically, without having to stop the production process.

At Dely, for example, Innomatic installed cameras that photograph each waffle individually. The accompanying software checks whether there are any holes or cracks, whether the amount of dough is exactly right, whether the wafers have risen enough, whether or not they contain burnt pieces, etc. Such a vision system, in combination with data logging, can also measure the yield per line and make adjustments where necessary. Suppose: the system notices that wafers are too heavy. Then it can send a signal to the oven so that the amount of dough there is automatically adjusted.

It is also possible to set up the cameras to recognize numbers. Are there the same number of caps on six bottles in a box, or is one missing? At Tien Sugar, in turn, such a vision system is used to check that the plastic bags in which fondant is poured are neatly positioned over the boxes.

Smart cameras can also be used for OCR (optical character recognition). At Vandemoortele, Innomatic installed a system that reads the lot number and date of each package. Because the basic information comes from the ERP system and not from an operator, problems can be detected automatically and quickly. So no products leave for the customer in the wrong packaging. Thanks to UV illumination, it is even possible to read virtually undetectable information on complex backgrounds.

For more info, check out our website www.innomatic.be For numerous realizations. 
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