Consider a juice pouch or even a bag of cough drops. A label affixed to the bag carries quality control tracking and other information. While flat when empty pouches expand and change shape as they are filled sealed and moved. So how can a vision system acquire an image of that information—printed on a stretched wrinkled warped or curved surface—and convert it to useful data? How can the vision system check the printing on the bag to ensure it meets package quality and safety standards?
Packaging operations employing non-rigid containers like pouches and bags have pushed the limits of machine vision technology because of contour changes and topographical variations in surface patterns that can occur during production. Cognex Corporation (www.cognex.com) offers a new software tool called PatFlexTM to address this problem. PatFlex the newest member of the industry-leading Cognex PatMax® family of geometric pattern finding technologies. A revolutionary patent-pending technology enables PatFlex to recognize distorted patterns in order to locate an object feature or pattern whose perspective or appearance changes randomly.
