Matrix Systems & Solutions (Sanborn, NY, USA; www.matrix-ssi.com) provides process manufacturers with packaging execution and warehouse management system applications. It was asked to design and deliver a turnkey machine-vision solution for a document mailer that processes approximately 10 million documents each month. The system was required to track and verify extremely sensitive medical documents as they are automatically inserted into envelopes.
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Because of the nature of these documents, the system was required to be error-free to prevent lawsuits—a 0.5% error rate would be unacceptable. The system consists of a Prosilica (Burnaby, BC, Canada; www.prosilica.com) GC1020 monochrome GigE camera mounted 6 in. above the inserter facing down. The camera captures images of the documents at 30 frames/s as they are pulled in a predefined sequence and fed onto a conveyor belt. The images are transmitted to a PC interfaced to a Data Matrix decoder and OCR software that read the barcodes to spot any breaks in the sequence and any errors.
