CATIE gives excellent resultsEuropean co-operation gives excellent results in CATIE project. CATIE stands for Colour and texture inspection equipment and the objective is to provide cost effective colour and texture based automatic inspection and sorting solutions for industry. Three application areas are considered: hot steel strip, wood slabs, and food. The project is now almost complete, and the results are very good. The work was done on three technical areas, namely illumination and imaging, methods for image analysis, and hardware for fast image processing. The main responsibility of the technical areas was on the research organisations: VTT Electronics, University of Oulu, Technical University of Denmark and the Fraunhofer Institute for Information and Data Processing from Germany. The project contained three
industrial cases, namely inspection of steel strip (Spectra-Physics VisionTech,
Finland, inspection of wood slabs for parquet industry (Junckers Industrier,
Denmark and STN Atlas, Germany) and food sorting, (Elexso Sortiertechnik,
Germany). Furthermore, TVI Vision, the leading RGB line scan manufacturer
developed a new, fast and sensitive 3-CCD camera family, PRICOLOR, within
the project.
 Two wood inspection and sorting systems were developed and piloted successfully during the project by Junckers and STN Atlas. Oulu based Spectra-Physics VisionTech is developing a pilot version of their new steel strip inspection system. The German SME partner, Elexso, is utilising the results of the CATIE project in their food-sorting machines. Elexso TR4 sorting machine is shown in the picture below.  VTT Electronics was responsible for the design, construction and prototyping of the illumination and imaging subs-systems for all the pilot cases. Fast line speeds, high-resolution requirements (up to 0,1 mm) and demand for accurate colour reproduction and illumination stability made the task most demanding. Our solution was to use modern illumination sources together with fiberoptic technology and TVI Vision colour cameras. The illumination and imaging sub-systems developed by VTT Electronics were found to perform well in all three cases and the industrial partners apply the solutions to their systems with success. The outstanding overall results and atmosphere of good co-operation in this European project encourage us to seek further co-operation with our current and new partners in the framework of EU R&D projects. For further information
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CATIE is an ESPRIT Project
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