
The OCR vision system designed and developed by Epic Systems to inspect alphanumeric codes on food packaging. Image courtesy of Epic Systems.
In the past, optical character recognition (OCR) vision systems were not traditionally thought of as fast, flexible, or maintainable. However, today’s systems are different, so when a worldwide, top manufacturer of cereal and snack products tasked EPIC Machine Vision Systems (EPIC; St Louis, MO, USA; www.epicvisionsystems.com) with installing one, the vision systems integrator was confident in its approach.
At the manufacturer site, a system rejects packaged food products with incorrectly printed data codes from the conveyor. While the previous system worked reasonably well, it was old and unsupported by the original software developer. The manufacturer sought to upgrade its existing system to meet new quality standards and industry food-safety standards and to improve the overall OCR inspection process.