4^th April 2008

20 bottles per second Milk Bottle Vision System at Foodex Meatex 2008

Scorpion Vision, the leading industrial vision software system has been deployed in a broad range of environments from automotive manufacturing to fish feeding analysis systems. The open platform and easy to use graphical interface with no programming requirements means Scorpion can be used by anybody and not just machine vision specialists. Well within the systems capabilities is in-line milk bottle inspection at up to 20 bottles per second. The system on display at Foodex is using a single Unibrain Firewire camera that is triggered when each bottle is in view of the camera. The vision system detects the presence of the label and calculates the offset from the edge of the label to the first character of the text to be read. It then applies a pattern match to each character and generates a ‘read’ for each match and outputs the sell by date to the host production monitoring system via a serial link. This process takes under 50ms to complete, meaning as many as 20 or more bottles can be read in 1 second. The inspection of inconsistent dot matrix characters is particularly robust due to the use of Scorpion’s TemplateFinder3 with Polygon Match tool.

Harford Control who are demonstrating Scorpion as part of their production monitoring product have developed the most mature and flexible set of standard tools and techniques available in Europe. These control manufacturing quality and measure Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) through an ethos of TPM/Kaizen. The Harford Central File-Server collects data from all sources including vision systems for automatic archiving in a Production Audit Trial. This level of semi-automatic reporting fits well into modern, flat-style management structures relying on teamwork. Continuous improvement is fuelled by readily available information on team progress. Harford also has the most mature quality module available. Date code recognition and barcode verification software (including EAN128) provide essential cost effective benefits - making customer 'fines' for non-conformance a thing of the past.

Harford Control will be exhibiting at Foodex Meatex 2008 on stand AB359.

Further details about Harford from www.harfordcontrol.com

Further information on Scorpion Vision software and industrial cameras from www.scorpionvision.co.uk

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