The Application of Machine Vision Inspection in Food Industry

Introduction of Machine Vision Technology

In modern food automation production, various detection and measurement technologies are involved, such as foreign object detection in mineral water, print quality inspection of beverage bottle caps, and barcode and character recognition on product packaging. These applications have a common feature of continuous large-scale production with very high requirements for appearance quality.

Generally, such highly repetitive work can only be done by human visual inspection. We often see hundreds or even thousands of inspection workers behind modernized production lines in some factories. This not only adds huge labor and management costs to the factory but also still cannot guarantee a 100% inspection qualification rate (i.e., "zero defects").

In today's intense business competition, not even a 0.1% defect is allowed to exist. To ensure product quality in production, defect detection must be carried out. Sometimes, human eyes cannot continuously, stably and efficiently accomplish tasks, such as small-size accurate and rapid measurement, shape matching, and character coding. Therefore, machine vision inspection technology is introduced for its speed, reliability, and repeatability of the results. The appearance of machine vision measurement has made up for this defect greatly.

Applications of Machine Vision Inspection in the Food and Beverage Industry Include:

Boxed/bagged food packaging inspection, which inspects the packaging of boxed or bagged food (including packaging damage, labels, production dates, etc.).
Detection of liquid levels and foreign objects in transparent bottled beverages to ensure consistency in beverage filling and to ensure that there are no foreign objects in the bottle.
Inspection of bottle cap packaging to eliminate defective products such as leaking or skewed bottle caps.
Quality, production date, and sequence number of pull tabs used in canned drinks, canned foods, and other packaging.
Inspection of paper box beverage packaging, such as whether the paper box beverage's outer packaging, straw, and printed characters are damaged.
Overall packaging of bottled and boxed beverages to ensure correct packaging quantity.

By setting up appropriate light sources and image acquisition devices, such as the telecentric objective, on the production line, images are captured and processed in real-time to obtain detection results. The operation is simple, the detection speed is fast, the accuracy is high, and the error rate is low.

Canrill Optics is the first company in China to specialize in marketing and designing of telecentric lenses and is the only company with a complete supply chain of industrial lens with its mechanical factory and optical factory. We have been striving for both manufacturing and arts in the optical industry.