Key Takeaways
Machine vision technology plays an important role in ensuring the quality and consistency of food products across industries - and in some unusual ways. It’s used for tasks such as inspecting meat packaging, classifying lollipops, and detecting defects in coffee balls.
Food in the factory
The surprising ways vision technology is changing food production
In the food and beverage industry, the need to consistently deliver high-quality products is driven both by consumers and regulatory agencies.
In particular, meat and poultry processors work hard to maintain their brand image and follow regulations, and as a result they take great strides to perform comprehensive end-to-end inspections. That includes everything from checking quality of incoming meat and poultry from the farms, to ensuring case packs of finished product are properly closed and labeled and various steps in between.
Let’s walk through some unique ways the meat processing industry and food & beverage industry have been impacted by machine vision systems.
Keeping an eye on everything from drumsticks to data labels
Chicken or turkey inspection/grading: These systems can detect missing legs or wings on poultry, and any tearing or bruising, making sure proper standards for freshness are met. The cameras in these systems can also identify different colors of poultry, to account for visual appeal, or even catch discolored or suspicious-looking meat.
Volumizing meat for cooking prior to packaging: These solutions make sure each product meets exact size requirements for consistency, and go through specific steps to make sure every cut undergoes an even cooking process before packaging.
Seal and label inspection: To help with meat freshness, systems can inspect absorbent pads and verify labels, making sure every package is labeled correctly. They help to make sure everything is properly protected, sealed, labeled, and meets safety standards.
Classifying meat for sorting: Poultry or beef cuts can be accurately identified and classified, ensuring that each piece is sorted accordingly at high speeds. The system’s sensors categorize each cut, saving time and resources.
Beyond meat and poultry inspections, we've seen Cognex systems being used in other food and beverage applications as well:
Pizza box identification with In-Sight 2800
When it comes to the fast-paced food and beverage industry, inventory management is very important. For one use case, the In-Sight 2800 could handle the process by identifying and tracking pizza boxes, ensuring that pizzerias are properly stocked and ready to package delicious pizzas.
Donut check with In-Sight 2800
For any retail food products, it’s important to make sure they are presented and packaged properly. We heard from one customer who uses the In-Sight 2800 to perform a "donut check." It verifies the proper orientation and correct alignment of donuts in boxes. That helps them improve product quality and visual appeal: donuts that taste good and look good!
Lollipop classification with edge learning
In another use case, the In-Sight 3800, equipped with edge learning AI intelligence, classifies different lollipops. It can accurately identify and categorize different variations in these lollipops like color or shape, and spots any malformed or disfigured lollipops to provide safe and tasty treats.
Chocolate mold check
When making high-quality chocolates, another customer used the In-Sight SnAPP sensor to identify problems with the molds used to form their candies. It inspected the molds for any misfills or obstructions, and could find defects from any orientation, making sure the molds were ready for the chocolate-making process.
Coffee ball inspection
When it comes to coffee, detecting defects during inspection is very important for meeting health and safety standards in production. The In-Sight SnAPP is up to the task: in one case, it was able to identify and inspect coffee balls for cracks, helping the manufacturer meet their very high quality coffee standards.
Bonus Applications
Outside the grocery aisles, machine vision continues to deliver
The food and beverage industry doesn't have a total lock on interesting applications. Here are some others that surprised us.
Dog tag data reading
Helping to aid the military, one of our solutions was used to read and identify intricate identification data on dog tags. This technology helps to make sure sensitive IDs and information get into the right hands of those who serve.
Wheel identification
In the automotive industry, parts have to be identified and inspected to meet the many quality standards in place. In one application, our smart cameras were able to read important details displayed on the top of metallic wheels, reading IDs and recognizing specific characters. This made sure that each wheel met the correct safety and performance specifications before it was shipped to a customer.
Color shade detection
Our systems have been used to help with precise color shade detection, to correctly identify different shades of color on a manufacturing line. In this example, the solution was able to identify pure white backgrounds, helping to correctly categorize swatches and optimize the ID process.
Foreign object detection
In manufacturing environments, identifying foreign objects on a product line is critical for quality control and safety. Our systems can accurately identify many variations of foreign objects that might appear and interfere in the inspection process. In one unusual case, our products needed to identify leaves that snuck into a production line and remove them from the process.
Where's Waldo identification
Imagine a world where Waldo can be found in the blink of an eye! Our cameras' software has advanced facial recognition algorithms that can quickly identify Waldo in his pictures. While you could probably make the case that using machine vision to find Waldo takes a little of the fun out of the popular book series, we like to think that the AI gets to have a little fun, too.
Thinking outside-the-box
As shown by this variety of applications, the value of machine vision-driven automation isn’t just about speed or accuracy—it’s also about adaptability. With the continued evolution of our technology, Cognex will continue to create out-of-the-box innovations to make it easy for manufacturers to tackle all kinds of out-of-the-box applications.