European Citizens and SMEs Now Profit from EC Initiative The HPCN (High Performance Computing and Networking) TTN Network is a technology transfer initiative established by the European Commission running between 1997 and March 2000. The HPCN TTN initiative is targeted at Small and Medium sized Enterprises. 609 companies have been involved in 173 projects, managed by 21 TTNs (Technology Transfer Nodes) all over Europe. The initiative has an overall budget of 70 million Euro partly funded by the European Commission and partly by industry. The HPCN TTN programme has stimulated the uptake of high-performance computing by industry. This initiative has specifically targeted smaller organisations, which can now afford low-cost powerful systems made out of commodity components such as standard PCs. Substantial emphasis has been placed on the novel application of HPCN to problems where it was previously too expensive or immature. On-line machine vision systems are good examples of this technology transfer process. A Profit In Drops
A cost-effective quality control system for the production of drippers and dropping pipes for irrigation has been developed running on a 300 MHz Pentium system. This offers significant advantages in the production of irrigation systems. A system costing around 10,000 euro per production line can save around 20,000 euro per year. This is achieved by reducing production idle time from 3.5% to 1.0%, wasted products from 2.0% to 0.5% and by virtually eliminating customer returns. Testimonial “Thanks to this smart and cost effective defect recognition system, our firm will dramatically cut the percentage of returned products and we will improve our reputation in the market with a zero-defect campaign.” Carmelo Giuffrè, CEO of SIPLAST Success Is On The Cards Improved quality control of plastic card production A key factor in the production of printed cards is graphical quality. There is a clear need for automatic quality control on the production line. This requires very quick inspection (around a few hundreds of milliseconds per card) to perform accurate control on the graphical quality of arbitrary images at a level of accuracy at least comparable to that attainable by a well trained operator. A product has been developed for the quality control of plastic cards and is available at a reasonable price. It is capable of controlling the graphical quality of cards at a level of accuracy higher than that attainable by human operators and at a faster rate. The tests performed show it is possible to have a high quality production of 98 acceptable cards out of every 100 made.
The automatic quality control challenge Attention has focused on computing the distortion of the image printed on the card with respect to the original model and on discarding cards when the distortion exceeds the allowed limit. The performance is excellent, a patent has already been issued, and there is a clear potential in other markets such as banknote printing, tile production and tool recognition by robots. In particular, the system has already been adapted to inspect the decoration on ceramic tiles. It has a great potential in this market segment as it is currently the only system on the available capable of implementing, at a low cost, three simultaneous quality criteria: tile size, defect size and tone difference.
A Blow For Better Quality Improved quality control of plastic container production
The Italian thermoplastic blow injection market is currently around 450,000 Tonnes per annum. This market is expanding rapidly due to the fact that an increasing number of industrial sectors such as food, chemical, pharmaceutical and cosmetic use plastic containers for their products. Because the users of these products are becoming more and more sensitive about hygiene, the quality of the container has a crucial impact on the final value of the product. Around 60 to 70% of the production of plastic containers is undertaken by SMEs. Due to a new automatic vision system, small plastics companies are able to cope with these stringent market requirements. This is because they now have affordable access to inspection systems able to measure and control quality over the complete production cycle. Burn marks, spurious membranes, shape defects and occluded holes will be no longer be a problem previously resulting in client dissatisfaction and the rejection of products. Low cost vision inspection The product is an automatic vision system able to perform non-invasive quality control in the production of items such as PVC bottles for industrial applications, PVC containers for cosmetic and medical applications such as dialysis, and PET bottles for mineral water. The system is simple to use, easy to install and maintain and is highly configurable at a cost affordable even by SMEs.
The system performs real-time inspection ranging from 1,500 pieces to 10,000 pieces per hour depending on production requirements. This inspection is performed immediately after blowing or during packaging. Depending of the performance needed the system is equipped with one, two or three 400 MHz Pentium processors. In industrial tests, the number of defective items has been reduced by between of 5 and 10% compared with that achievable by human inspection and with a global cost reduction of 8-12%. Furthermore the entire production process is now under continuous control thus avoiding the rejection of whole batches. The cost of the smallest complete configuration (comprising one processor) lies between 7,200 to 8,200 euros. A New Quarry For Computers Automatic quality grading of marble, granite and other stone Quality control in the grading of marble, granite and other building stone is very labour intensive, tedious and hard. Operators work in dusty and humid environments. People can only work for short periods before they need a break. This is a challenging application for automatic quality control systems due to the large variety of different types of stones and strict limits on the acceptable variations of colour and pattern. MASC clusters slabs or tiles according to aesthetic properties into homogeneous piles. This automatic identification is based on the capture by a computer of the skills of experts. The industrial benefits of MASC are faster, cheaper and better grading of stone slabs and tiles, increased line capacity, more consistent quality and savings in materials and production costs. A further benefit is the reduction in the level of low-grade and unpleasant employment associated with the quarrying industry. A Light On The Tiles OUTLINE is an automated system based on machine vision which can be effectively used in tile sorting to increase the quality and the value of production. Quality control in ceramic tile manufacturing is hard, labour intensive and is performed in a harsh industrial environment with noise, extreme temperature and humidity. The quality and value of a batch of tiles are affected by the presence of surface defects and differences in dimension, shape and flatness. OUTLINE demonstrates that an automated system based on machine vision can be effectively used in tile sorting to increase the quality and the value of production. Humans can only work effectively on this job for short periods. Continuity over time is not guaranteed and this may result in overall poor quality causing customers to complain or even reject the batch. The goal is a correct classification that is repetitive, with the same level of accuracy over the time which can guarantee better production yield and avoid most customer acceptance problems. The preliminary evaluation of benefits shows that OUTLINE may pay for itself in less than one year. A Lynx Is Watching Your Car An advanced video surveillance system automtically monitors supermarket car parks and alerts security personnel to suspicious behaviour.
What better opportunity for a thief than a supermarket car park! At the Auchan supermarket in Turin, as at other supermarkets, plenty of parked cars can be found within a rather small area. One can easily walk between cars and, without letting on, have a look inside for interesting goods such as radios and cassette recorders. Once the target is found, it’s is not difficult for a skilful thief to pick the lock and get away with the loot. Not any more! An advanced video surveillance system, called “Lynx”, sharing the intelligence and piercing eyes of its namesake, screens all images from the car park and sounds an alarm as soon as it detects a suspicious person. Such a sophisticated system is not even expensive: The Lynx system operating the two cameras in the car park only costs about 9000 Euro. With such a powerful and cheap system, thieves will no longer be able to consider supermarket car parks as good hunting grounds, but rather as sophisticated traps. Computer Checks Up! A computer system that can read handwriting has speeded up cheque processing by more than 35%. Computers that can read handwriting have speeded up cheque processing by more than 35%. This represents a saving in manpower of 80 hours on 150 000 documents. ATOS, an independent cheque processing company, provides a service to major banks in France. Last year they installed a trial system at their unit in Courbevoie. After achieving a substantial reduction in errors compared to human handling of cheques, ATOS has bought the system from Unisys and A2iA, distributors of the product. ATOS’ operators were complimentary about the automated system, because it left them with more interesting problems to solve, the ones that the computer software was not intelligent enough to handle. The A2iA software runs on off-the-shelf hardware: Pentium II processor based PC machines. Their product, ICR SW INTERCHEQUE, runs under Windows NT. The workload can be distributed among several processors linked in a local network, resulting in a scalable solution suitable for a range of customer needs. A Robot With Vision
Contacts and more information These articles were written by Francis Wray as part of the HPCN-TTN Initiative. You find the full texts of these applications and many more at URL: www.hpcn-ttn.org Antti Soini
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