Role of the Incorporation of Machine Vision to Improve Food Inspections

With the machines turning intelligent every day, every industry will find various new applications and ways to benefit from them.

FREMONT, CA: Machine vision offers tools that can be used to build hardware and software that can notice its surroundings and draw conclusions about the things it sees. This concept is nearly new, but the current developments back up a wide range of exciting industrial technologies, from robots to dramatically improved food inspection processes. When discussing the food industry, considering its numerous moving parts and risk-aversion, machine vision and machine learning are valuable additions to the supply chain.

There are various ways machine vision can be applied in the food processing environment, with new variations on the technology cropping up regularly.

Sorting for Large Product Batches

Automation is an excellent addition to the food and beverage sector, translating into improved worker safety and efficiency, and reasonable quality control across the enterprise. Machine vision inspection systems can become a part of a much greater automation effort. Inspection stations with machine vision cameras can scan single products or whole batches of the products to identify flaws. Physically segregating these products must be as competent as a process as identifying them; therefore, machine vision is an ideal partner to compressed air systems.

3-D Machine Vision

To execute successful inspections, machine vision systems require optimal lighting. If the area of the scanning environment rests in the shadow, defective products might find their way onto shelves and into customers' homes. Sometimes food products have unique needs when carrying out visual inspections. For example, human eyes can't perform a detailed scan of thousands of peas or nuts as they pass over a conveyor belt. The 3-D machine vision provides a tool named "frame grabbing," which can take stills of tens of thousands of tiny, moving products to separate the flaws and perform sorting.

Near-Infrared Cameras

Machine vision has various forms like barcode and OR code readers. A new technology, near-infrared (NIR) cameras, improves machine vision’s usefulness and capabilities. The fruits and vegetables don't appear on the outside. NIR technology extends the light spectrum cameras that can observe interior damage.