Competitive Business with Machine VisionSuccessful business is based
on high-quality products. Product quality is often controlled by visual
inspection. Machine vision is superior to human inspection in applications
calling for continuous control. In high-speed applications inspection is
often limited to sample inspection made off-line. New high-speed machine
vision systems are powerful enough to inspect all the products on-line.
This is due to powerful processors and algorithms, often built utilizing
parallel-processing techniques.
 Benefits achieved
 Industries challenges Biscuit samples for instance are inspected at a speed of 60 biscuits per second, where many different features affecting final quality being inspected. Automatic web inspection is used in the wood, metal, paper, plastic and textile industries, where line speeds may rise up to 100 km/hour. Machine vision is entering new industries, where its applications are still few because of the great challenges of the technique and its costs. The food industry and agriculture are good examples. Visual attractiveness is one reason for producing high-quality food products, but quality is often related to production line uptime, yield and cleanliness as well. When the fillings are fed to biscuits or pizzas properly, the conveyors remain clean and the system runs smoothly. If something goes wrong, visual inspection can react immediately or, even better, give advance warning, when something starts to go beyond the pre-set limits. Continuous quality control
also produces powerful feedback for statistical process control and process
development. Therefore, once the system is installed and working properly,
most users start to realize the kind of information source they have and
the trends and features they really want to follow and use in their further
process development.
 Agriculture is an area which
is going more and more towards large production units and where investments
in production development and quality control are taking on increasing
importance. Here we are working with natural materials, plants, animals
and their subsets, which all differ from each other. Nevertheless they
still have many features which can be controlled with machine vision techniques.
Different algorithms have been developed to solve these types of problems.
Neural networks are used to train the system to be an expert in demanding
grading and quality control applications.
Machine vision technology has been applied to applications, where critical features can only be detected with wide dynamic range vision sensors. 12-bit and higher dynamic range colour vision challenges human eye especially, when the colours are dark. Stone and ceramic industries
deal with similar sorting and quality control problems. You cannot just
throw away everything which does not fit the set tolerances. Sorting and
colour matching give much more value to the products and the yield of the
production line improves. When trying to detect different materials, vision
systems can use wavelengths beyond those of human vision. Spectral imaging
collects spectral and spatial information on the material to be inspected.
Applications like glass sorting in recycling or ceramic tile grading have
been successfully developed and are already in use. Spectral imaging is
a new tool for challenging vision applications.
  HPCN at Work Over recent years, High-Performance Computing and Networking (HPCN) has emerged from the research laboratory and is now a powerful tool at the disposal of even the smallest organizations. Its applications are varied, its use straightforward and its benefits large. Many organizations are now enjoying a more profitable business from its use in areas as diverse as manufacturing, film and video production, civil engineering, medicine, nuclear power, equipment design, quality control, security, transport and urban and regional planning. High-Performance Computing provides benefits to industry To be able to respond effectively to the ever-rising challenges of industrial applications, machine vision providers have to equip their products and systems with the latest hardware and software available on the market. Two years ago European Commission initiated a technology transfer programme to promote application of HPCN to industrial use. Twenty Technology Transfer Nodes (TTN) were established in different countries of the European Union. Over 150 projects are now producing promising results. The TTNs are supporting them in promoting the results achieved and encouraging industries to adopt these new technologies to benefit their own businesses. Some of the benefits achieved are listed on the left. Contact To learn more,
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