Local and international manufacturers of food products must align to the strict requirements regarding the safety of alimentary products. The installations must be equiped with systems that ensure traceability of the products, so any part of the food chain can be watched. This process requires collecting information for each product.
Machine vision systems, equipped with OCR tools provide four key functions for processing and packaging operations in the food and beverages industries:
1. Presence: they verify if the descriptions of the products and identification texts have been printed on the product
2. Tracking: they track the products and ingredients in the whole production chain
3. Identification: they ensure that labels, barcodes and/or Data Matrix codes match with the products
4. Checking: they check if the labels are printed corectly, clearly, for the safety of customers and brand management
Vision systems do all these tasks by capturing images of the product on the production line. The images are then analyzed using OCR tools on the visualization system, that locates the text string and "reads" alphanumeric codes. In order to process these codes, vision systems need fractions of a seconds. After that, they pass the extracted data to the factory's network, in order for them to be analyzed and stocked. Thus, they improve the management of the supply chain.
The benefits that companies can have by using OCR technology, in food and beverage industry are:
- Improving the response time: if there were problems in the supply chain, vision systems offer to manufacturers the information needed in order for them to take corrective measures
- Reduced liability: vision systems realize an excellent detection of the products with incorrect markings
- Improved productivity: using vision systems ensures the conformity of products and increases customer's satisfaction
By using vision systems that can read bothe alphanumeric text and 1D and 2D codes, you can track alimentary products and beverages moving with high speeds, with a better precision than manual inspection.
