Many of today’s pharmaceutical products are primary packaged in round, opaque plastic bottles. The requirement to verify a serialized code on the bottle or to check the presence of labels, the positioning of labels / logos or the presence of tamper evidence tags, makes it necessary to scan the entire body of the bottle after the labeling process.
Pending global regulations and corporate initiatives to secure the supply chain and protect consumers from counterfeit products, are leading packagers to apply serialized 2D codes to their bottled products, when those bottles are the lowest unit of sale. Tracking those serialized containers to the bundle or case, in order to capture aggregation data for full traceability of products at all packaging levels, pose a unique challenge on the packaging line.
Seidenader Vision, a leading supplier for inspection technology to the pharmaceutical industry, has met this challenge by developing a module to check cylindrical objects around their entire surface: the SV360.
With the new SV360 solution, these bottles can be checked on-the-fly, capturing a 360 degree view of the unoriented bottle on the conveyor. The inspection module can be integrated anywhere on the conveyor, typically at the infeed of the bundler or case packer, for speeds of up to 400 containers/minute. By using a six camera solution, and positioning the cameras 60 degrees apart, the SV360 locates, reads, and verifies the 2D code every time by capturing six individual images of the bottle as it passes through the inspection module.
The Seidenader SVIM, a high performance vision processor, takes these images which overlap, analyzes each individual image or “stitches“ them together to create one image to be analyzed. The codes are read, verified and documented in the database to the next level of aggregation.
