Department Visual Inspection Systems (SPR)
The Visual Inspection Systems department develops and delivers systems for automated visual inspection, performing tasks such as sorting bulk goods, inspecting food and providing quality assurance for transparent and reflecting materials.
Our work revolves around using optronic sensors and machine vision to characterize and inspect various materials and objects. We work with high-resolution line scan cameras of various types (color, grayscale, UV and imaging NIR), area scan cameras, laser scanners, hyperspectral technology and inexpensive NIR point spectroscopy sensors. The imaging equipment is customized for each specific task and relies heavily on folded beam paths and LED fash illumination. Our expertise also includes high-performance system architectures with specially developed framegrabbers and image exploitation algorithms; these are essential given the inspections’ high throughput rates and the need to build databases of reference data. Our solutions are currently in use in a great number of factories, where they perform tasks such as quality control.
We develop systems that sort bulk goods automatically. They are used in recycling (e.g. glass, plastic, construction and demolition waste), mining (minerals) and the food industry (for purifying coffee, tea, grains, grapes and other products). Other systems we have designed can inspect
surfaces for defects, inspect and classify transparent materials of all shapes, measure the color of granulates and inspect tablet blister packs. Currently, we are working on a mobile food scanner that uses NIR spectroscopy to check the composition, freshness and quality of foodstuffs.