Machine vision for food and beverage
The food and beverage industry combines high production speeds with demanding requirements for quality, packaging and traceability.
Machine vision systems allow contact-free inspection directly in the production process - from the individual food item to the finished pack.
Typical applications are foreign object and quality inspection, sorting, fill level measurement, bottle inspection, label inspection, OCR and code reading.
Quality inspection of food products
Cameras can inspect and classify products by visual properties, for example:
- size
- shape
- color
- ripeness
- damage
- completeness
- surface quality
Combined with AI, even naturally variable products can be classified reliably.
Sorting
Machine vision enables automatic sorting of food products by defined quality criteria.
Applications are found in fruit, vegetables, meat products, bakery goods and other processed items.
Foreign object detection
Depending on the material, visible, NIR, SWIR or other imaging methods can be used to detect foreign material or differences in material.
Bottle inspection
Typical inspection tasks are:
- bottle neck
- damage
- cracks
- closure
- cap
- label
- fill level
- code
Fill level inspection
Camera systems verify without contact whether bottles, jars or other containers have been filled correctly.
For liquids or packaging that are hard to see, specific wavelengths can be an advantage.
Label inspection
Machine vision can check:
- label present
- correct position
- correct variant
- print quality
- barcode
- batch number
- best-before date
OCR and date verification
Printed best-before or production dates can be read by OCR and compared against the expected content.
Hygienic production environments
In areas with moisture, cleaning agents or splash water, correspondingly protected vision components may be required.
Depending on the installation position, IP67-rated cameras and suitable industrial connectors are advisable.
Typical components
- industrial cameras
- IP67 cameras
- color cameras
- monochrome cameras
- SWIR cameras
- code readers
- lenses
- dome and diffuse lighting
- backlights
- polarizing filters