360° Label Inspection On Pharmaceutical Bottles

Published: November 8, 2021

 

The Project: The customer was asked by a pharmaceutical company to develop an inline vision system to verify labels on small plastic bottles at a rate of 60 ppm. The inspection required performing OCR to read the reference code, control or lot number on the label for Track and Trace purposes. Moreover, they had to verify that the label was applied correctly on the bottle: specifically the “double-label” issue was checked, that is when two labels were incorrectly applied to the bottle.

The Solution:
Choosing the right lens
Based on the size of the samples, a PC13030XS pericentric lens was selected. This model is part of the PC series by Opto Engineering®, a family of lenses designed to see the top and side of an object in perfect focus, all in one image. In particular, the PC13030XS is optimized for 1/3” sensors, with a field of view ranging from 7.5 to 55 mm in diameter and from 5 to 20 mm in height.
PC13030XS by Opto Engineering® (left) and a schematic of the working principle (right).	PC series by Opto Engineering® allows to see the top and lateral surfaces avoiding complex and expensive multi-camera systems.
Choosing the right illuminator
Picking the right illuminator is paramount in every machine vision application but it can be a challenging task when specialty optics are deployed. To ease the process, Opto Engineering® offers a dedicated line of high-power LED ring lights specifically designed to offer the perfect illumination geometry for 360° view lenses. In this case a LTRNHP210W20 white ring light (see Figure 3) was selected to achieve very uniform illumination of the samples. By combining the ring light with a LTDV1CH-17V led strobe controller, the customer was also able to decrease exposure by 9 times.