Due to lean practices and tight margins, the food and beverage industries are under tremendous pressure to increase the effectiveness of their machinery and equipment while maintaining a high level of product quality. In the meantime, successful manufacturers employ machine vision and barcode scanning technology to cut down on production interruptions, consistently create safer, higher-quality items, and ensure that these machine vision products can be traced along the supply chain.
Applications of Machine Vision Products in the Food Production Industry
Here are the numerous applications of machine vision products in the food production industry:
Food Quality Inspection
Fruit Grading & Defective Fruit Sorting
Traditional machine vision products could only distinguish between basic fruit shapes and sizes but lacked the capability to accurately determine the color, root, and stem quality of the fruit. This resulted in a high rate of incorrect sorting, leading to a waste of excellent produce and decreased efficiency in the food production industry. Nevertheless, as technology advanced, so did the application of machine vision products in the fruit grading and sorting process. These upgraded systems now incorporate more advanced algorithms and imaging techniques to accurately identify and distinguish the color, root, and stem quality of the fruit. For example:
Drink Filling Inspection
Broken Bottle Inspection
The food production process begins with picking up the glass bottles and leaving them for washing and drying at the start; then comes the liquid or milk filling procedure that asks for attention to the conditions of the utensils being filled. In this case, the previously assigned equipment acts in a foolhardy way to ignore the cracks in the bottle glass and yet fill it up to the top without realizing the health concerns it can cause to the customer’s life. Therefore, machine vision products involve visual inspection processing via a fantastic control system that identifies all the harmful properties on the given milk bottles automatically.
Capping Inspection
To inspect the capping process, traditional machine vision products faced several drawbacks, such as difficulty in recognizing transparent or reflective surfaces, limited accuracy in detecting minor defects, and a high rate of false alarms. With the advancement of machine vision technology, new and upgraded machine vision products have been developed for capping inspection applications. These upgraded products use more advanced image processing algorithms to improve accuracy and reduce false alarms while utilizing multiple cameras with different lighting conditions and angles to capture high-resolution images of the capping process, which helps eliminate the issue of recognizing transparent or reflective surfaces. In addition, these machine vision products have a higher inspection speed and can detect even minor defects in the cap or bottle.
Liquid Level Inspection
Every glass bottle on the moving track has a marked level that requires high precision to identify the filled liquid quantity of the beverage. This specified liquid volume needs automated inspection gadgets to distinguish the right volume of filled milk bottles from the under or overfilling ones. Thus, the food industry demands a balance in every filled milk bottle, and to maintain the exact volume in every beverage, there’s nothing more exceptional than the ultra-modern systems of machine vision products. Involving advanced devices like industrial 2D/3D cameras, all the milk bottles follow an identical liquid volume that showcases symmetry and an organized industrial setting.
Package Inspection
Counting
In the massive food production industry, package inspection becomes a hectic process, especially when bulk food items need to be recorded to keep data on the stored inventory. Often similar food boxes and drinking bottles get miscalculated by the ordinary machine vision implements, which causes a huge mess in the logistic operations and increases the probability of unaware financial decisions. However, that’s where modern machine vision products come into play with their stunning features and functions. Not only do these up-to-date automated inspection gadgets eliminate the possibility of an inaccurate countdown, but the new warehouse environments also use barcode scanners and readers to ensure precise inventory data for good.
Missing Component Inspection
In an unorganized inventory setup, things get complicated when a component gets lost in the food section. All the identical drinking bottles and food boxes appear similar, whereas old-fashioned inspection tools take more time to recover a mainly targeted commodity. Hence, finding the inventory treasure game becomes a daunting challenge that demands new machine vision products to instantly read and record codes on the food labels. Such 2D and 3D industrial barcode readers can quickly identify lost food components, like accurately finding a needle in a haystack.
Label and Printed Information Inspection
Last but not least, the most detail-oriented part of the packaging lies in labeling and information printing, and that’s where the food production industry suffers the most. In this specified scenario, not only does a lot of expensive design material go down the drain with a tiny printing error but also plenty of production money gets wasted down the line. Needless to say, the brand image that gets destroyed by an item having the wrong packaging size or printing initials over it. Henceforth, the ultimate solution to these dangerous mistakes is adapting machine vision products, which can easily carry out significant packaging attributes through enhanced classification, OCR, and detection algorithms.
The Best Machine Vision Products in the Market!
After going through some brief pointers regarding the essential automated inspection machinery and how it can enhance the overall production line output with its smart technology functions and features, it’s time to select the best machine vision company, namely, SmartMoreInside.
SmartMoreInside, which appears as the global supplier of innovative machine vision products and is equally trusted by many overseas machine vision companies without a second thought. Above and beyond, our most highlighted machine vision software is SMore ViMo, which is an entire platform that can smartly run the whole food production process while improvising every possible error detected and beyond. The reason behind this versatility is the four algorithms: OCR, segmentation, detection, and classification.
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