Cognex offers industrial vision and barcode reading solutions also in the agri-food sector to minimize downtime and always guarantee safe and high quality products, easily traceable throughout the supply chain.
Cognex wants to help agri-food producers face some challenging challenges such as inspection, verification and tracing applications. Today we will focus on the inspection aimed at a precise control of product quality.
How can we improve operations with Cognex machine vision systems?
- Adapting production lines to regular product changes making them more reliable and versatile
- By reducing production costs and avoiding long and costly rework
- By reducing waste thanks to smarter automation (for example by detecting defective products from the start of the production process in order to avoid downtime)
- Preventing the marketing of damaged or damaged products in order to preserve the company’s reputation
Cognex inspection to check the quality of the products
Cognex inspection devices allow you to immediately identify any product problems, in order to discard it before it completes the entire production process.
The inspection activity allows:
- the identification of damaged products
- the detection of foreign objects and or debris
- a reduction in costly downtime and manual intervention
- a reduction in downtime due to the change of package format
- control of food portioning
- verification of the correspondence between the product and the package to be used
- verification of the uniformity of the product in terms of size, shape, color, consistency and filling level
Inspection by Cognex solutions can also be done on the packaging process. Verification by the vision systems is carried out in terms of correct assembly and integrity of the packaging, the label, the batch / expiry date and the warranty seals.
Example of a Cognex 3D inspection of the final product and packaging
Food products, with a lot of variability, pose a unique challenge for Cognex automated quality control systems. Identifying the differences between candies, verifying that the icings and decorations are correct, and determining that a finished product will fit within its packaging are complex tasks for vision systems. For this reason, Cognex has developed integrated 3D solutions with easy-to-use software.
Systems that use real 3D images are easier and more intuitive than 2D systems with flat images that use color to represent different heights. In-Sight software, for example, provides true 3D blob tools and 3D edge extractors to verify lengths, widths, heights, volumes and more.
In-Sight software, in conjunction with Cognex’s smart camera, makes it easy to set up a floor plan or conveyor belt and measure all other objects from that reference.
The software then determines the 3D position of each pixel above and below that plane with real 3D linear and volumetric measurements. By working with familiar programs such as spreadsheets, even non-technical operators can take advantage of the In-Sight software.
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