Continuous monitoring of individual products

The WebSPECTOR, from UK company Shelton Vision Systems, is a versatile machine vision inspection system particularly suitable for the manufacture in continuous or batch form of individually formed products. It will assess a product for size, shape and completeness and will record small deviations and non-conformance trends in real time to enable corrective action to be taken or prevent further processing of faulty products.

Depending on the requirements of the operating process, there are three main modes of operation for fault detection. All detect, record size and position of the fault. One mode will also attract the operator's attention to indicate a fault, while another will not only attract the attention of the operator but also stop the machine if the fault is severe. Fault maps as well as listings showing position and type of fault detected can be produced.

The Shelton WebSPECTOR records images of every defect using digital frame grabbers that acquire, pre-process and transfer images in real time to system memory at 200MB/sec. Fast PCs and efficient code are essential to processing the vast amount of image data acquired.

The flexibility of the design of the webSPECTOR enables the system to be adapted to any process, thanks to a range of alternative types of processes and filters within the systems application software. The actual processes used for an application and its parameters are selected from a database of parameter sets.

The system is 'trained' by capturing images of the material and adjusting the various parameters so that all defects are detected without producing false alarms. The optimised settings are then saved as a new parameter set. When the operator changes the material specification, the correct parameter sets are automatically called up.