Friday, 29 June 2012

Machine Vision - Soliton Technologies

Machine Vision in Printing Industry
        Soliton Technologies, 14 year old, a pioneer in machine vision products and solutions based on India. In this August (2012)
 Soliton is going to launch a automation product that will reduce paper wastage while printing. Reduction is wastage will up to 50 percent compared to earlier  manual methods. A smart camera  would take pictures of the printed newspapers as they come out of the press, detect any errors in the color registration (CMYK). Cyan, Magenta and Yellow are secondary colours used in printing industry and K stands for Black colour. The detected errors are automatically corrected using correction motors present in the press. This process is instantaneous and thus paper wastage is reduced.

Jewellery
     They have done R&D work to develop a automation technology that will able to inspect, sort and defect detection in the manufacture of jewellery.

CASE STUDY in Pencil Manufacturing
     A pencil manufacturing   factory was manufacturing one million pencils per day. It employed 60 people inspect and remove defective pencils.  A good quality pencils, can have lead offset of 300 µm only. If the offset increases further pencil leads will break when sharpened. This length is nearly impossible to judge manually. When production was increased to 2 million pencils per day, the manufacturer went for a fully automated system. It means that within a second 23 pencils should be inspected.  This project was handed over to Soliton.  Machine Building and Automation division of Titan Industries was roped by Soliton to build system that will bring the pencils before the camera with minimal vibration. Each of the two ends are inspected by colour camera connected by IEEE 1394 interface.  Depending upon the type of pencils inspected either florescent or fiber optic light is used. They use LabView from National Instruments with IMAQ vision library provided by National Instruments (NI). Image processing algorithms have to find all defects (lead offset, wood chip-off, crack etc) within a time of 40ms. If a pencil is found defective  it is dropped into reject bin else it is lacquered, finished and boxed.

Smart Camera
Smart cameras do not require a PC for operation. It can operate stand alone. Soliton has launched a smart camera named Soliton Neo. It contains a buit-in camera, powerful DSP processor, LED lights and other required interfaces like Ethernet to connect to a laptop or remote PC. One has to use a custom software and able to control the camera thats it.
 More Info
  •  Soliton is a industry sponsor for TIFAC CORE on Machine Vision  setup at Rajalakshmi Engineering College (REC), Chennai. This was inagurated by Dr. Chidambaram, Principal Scientific Advisor to the Government of India on 30th June 2009.
  • Instrumentation and Control Engineering students can check analog speedometer webpage and they can try as their final year project.
  • Look into Soliton webpage's case study, press release, in the news section. Very interesting project idia one may get

 Sources:

  
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