<title>Automatic x-ray inspection of canned products for foreign material</title>

Abstract

The manufacture of food products for human consumption is an operation requiring strict levels of quality assurance to ensure that no foreign material is entrained in the final product. Once the product has been packaged, the options for inspection are severely limited. The machine vision team at Industrial Research Ltd. has, on a number of occasions, undertaken the inspection of large quantities of such products using x-ray video imaging and visual inspection. To perform such an operation manually is at best tedious, but also entails a degree of concentration that is difficult to maintain over long periods of time. This paper discusses the development of a real-time system for automatically inspecting canned products. The system uses high speed vision hardware to inspect the contents of each can. The system is capable of automatically rejecting cans containing foreign material.