Quality control
Vision system
ensures flawless quality control
Customer challenge
Food products with abnormal shapes or colours: for food companies, these are losses they would rather not see. Deploying staff to check quality is often not feasible due to the speed of the production process. Often, the margin of error is also too large.
The solution
Innomatic uses smart cameras to monitor product quality throughout the entire production process. These cameras can check the size, shape and colour of products, as well as detect contaminants. Defective products can be removed manually or automatically without having to halt the production process.
At Dely, for example, Innomatic installed cameras that photograph each waffle individually. The accompanying software checks for holes or cracks, whether the amount of dough is correct, whether the waffles have risen enough, whether they contain burnt pieces, etc. In combination with data logging, such a vision system can also measure the yield per line and make adjustments where necessary. Suppose the system notices that the waffles are too heavy. It can then send a signal to the oven so that the amount of dough is automatically adjusted.
It is also possible to set up the cameras to recognise numbers. Are there six caps on six bottles in a box, or is one missing? At Tiense Suiker, such a vision system is used to check whether 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 batch number and date on each package. Because the basic information comes from the ERP system, and not from an operator, problems can be detected automatically and quickly. This means that no products are sent to the customer in incorrect packaging. Thanks to UV lighting, it is even possible to read virtually undetectable information on complex backgrounds.
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