Quality Control
Self-driving cars, machine learning, networking systems of production and storage units, smart self-stocking shelves: the digitization of society and industry (so-called Industry 4.0) is advancing rapidly, offering several seminal technologies and innovations – some of which are already in use or about to be implemented.
In all industrial sectors, the relevance of image processing is continuously on the rise. Image processing includes the capturing, modification, and analysis of images, for instance in the context of production or packaging processes. The main objective is to extract relevant information from the images in order to steer processes, test products, document completeness or integrity, or perform general quality control.
Solutions based on the analysis of digital images are becoming more and more popular, especially in answer to challenges of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, which led to the digitization and interlinking of production means.
Solutions Tailored to Our Customer’s Needs
Besides our specific solutions for quality control in the food and pharmaceutical industries, we develop tailor-made, client-specific solutions for all kinds of quality control systems. The main parameters to be controlled are size accuracy, completeness, correct components, detecting optical defects, etc. Our solutions can be found in numerous applications in the chemical, automotive, automotive suppliers, electronics, timber, and many other industries.
Machine vision systems are continuously catching on, especially so in the chemical industries. Pore analysis is a typical sample task in chemical plants, in which the quality parameters of porous or granular material are determined and/or controlled. Before, these kinds of analyses would have required a lot of time and personnel, if they were even possible at all.
The so-called blob analysis is based on digital images taken by industrial cameras. It is possible, for example, to only evaluate blobs with a certain dimension, a minimum roundness, or blobs in defined, distinct areas of the image. All blobs which meet the criteria can be assigned specific values such as quantity, area, height, width, circumference, or roundness. Not only porous materials – such as foamed plastic or building materials, packaging, foams, or bakery goods – can be analyzed in this manner, the detection and analysis of foreign particles that differ in color or of float within a carrier medium are also possible.
Our solution SAFE-IDENT Cell quickly and easily analyzes the material composition of objects and determines the number, size, and quality of pores and particles. Our compact measuring station can be configured to varying object sizes, work distances, and environmental conditions by using different cameras and optics. It can thus fulfill very specific client needs.
Depending on the application, custom-made plastic films differ not only in material and thickness but also in dimensions and other characteristics, such as finish. For this, the films are unwound from the reel at high speed in the post-production process. This process electrostatically charges the film, causing small dirt particles or insects to cling to the foil and be wound up with it. This is problematic if the film is to be used in food industries.
Our product SAFE-IDENT Impurity is a complete solution using a high-resolution line scan camera, which detects dirt and other foreign particles while winding the foil. Under normal production conditions, the system can differentiate between actual impurities and pseudo errors caused by other disruptive factors.
Normally, the quality monitoring of foodstuffs is based on technical parameters such as shape, moisture, color, weight, dimensions, degree of ripeness or level of browning.
Our innovation SAFE-IDENT Quality, on the other hand, checks non-quantifiable aesthetic aspects of a food product: The visual beauty. It inspects raw products and fully automatically reports the results.
A hyperspectral camera can distinguish a brown nut shell from a brown nut in a matter of seconds and send a signal to eject the foreign particle. This guarantees that the consumer does not encounter shell residues in end products such as muesli, cookies or chocolate.
Our SAFE-IDENT Sort sorting machine distinguishes individual spectra of IO and NIO parts. Inside the machine, our image processing software controls 32 integrated blow-out nozzles, which ensure precise ejection of the NIO components. The pure IO components are all that remain.
Impurities in chocolate are a disaster for manufacturers and consumers, which is why every bar must be checked before packaging. Employing staff to check each product individually is too expensive and has a high error rate.
Our software detects even the smallest crumb. If a color particle that deviates from the norm appears, a signal is given and the corresponding bars are automatically ejected. This happens while one or more inline cameras record the passing bars and evaluate them in real time.
We generate individual solutions for the automotive industries and tailor them specifically to our customers’ needs. We have developed a camera system that checks the output of production processes inline. This way we can for instance control whether the airbags are pressed correctly in the corresponding installations or if there are any scratches on parts of the body.
Please contact us if you are interested! Let us know what you need for your next project and we will carry out your individual feasibility study.
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