Label Inspection Systems Step Up to New Standards

Considered neither friend nor foe, the Food and Drug Administration is the watchdog of the food, beverage, medical and pharmaceutical industries.

Laws are made, and if product producers don’t comply, there are consequences: consumer litigation,  recalls and associated expenses, and the loss of brand image, according to John Lewis, spokesman for Cognex, a machine vision and vision sensor manufacturer.

Recently, the FDA has focused with increasing frequency on labeling. The Bioterrorism Act of 2002, requiring track-and-trace measures on any part of the food chain, and the Food Allergen Labeling and Consumer Protection Act are just two of many required changes.

In the pharmaceutical industry, companies are being pushed to redesign their labels for compliance packages. Companies are also often forced to follow state mandates, even though they sometimes conflict with federal guidelines.

While these regulations ultimately benefit the public, they’ve created challenges for companies to constantly update their labels, and equipment manufacturers to develop inspection/detection platforms that are flexible enough to roll with the changes.

 

In an almost constant flurry of label changes to include allergy information and simplify pharmaceutical packages, labels on production lines are changed multiple times in a shift.

According to Blake DeFrance, product marketing specialist for In-Sight vision sensors at Cognex, some customers work with as many as 140 different package types, and expect a single inspection system to verify all current label variations and accommodate future products.

With conventional coding, manufacturers are blessed with the laborious task of “teaching” the vision controller the new characters and fonts. New software programs such as Quest, from Omron, have pre-loaded fonts and characters that can be read forward or backward on a label.

“A lot of pharmaceutical and food companies are concerned with maintaining uptime and increasing productivity,” says Robert Lee, sensor group marketing manager for Omron. “They want something that you can really plug and play.”

While hardware updates continue, some system advancements are software-based. For example, with the PatQuick geometric pattern matching software from Cognex, one vision-sensor program can inspect and detect all of a customer’s needs by recognizing and memorizing label text without the need for parameter configuration.

Manually comparing labels in different file formats makes the inspection process extremely challenging. Individuals are often faced with having to check an artwork piece to a Microsoft Word document. Since the layout and format is different, it makes the inspection process even more difficult and time-consuming. “They are mandated to check it at 200%,” says David Perlis, chief operating officer for proof-reading software developer Global Vision Inc.

As a result, systems were developed that can compare multiple file types. Global Vision’s Docu-Proof, can compare documents with unlike file formats. The program also inspects Braille—a format gaining prevalence in European packaging, Perlis says. Docu-Proof works hand in hand with Digital-Page, a pixel-based artwork inspection platform. In the next few years, manufacturers are expected to replace Portable Document Format (PDF) and text files with Structured Product Labeling (SPL) files, a new standard mechanism for exchanging medical information.

“The organizations that start applying XML technologies will gain a lot of efficiencies that they’re not getting now,” Perlis says. (XML, the acronym for eXtensible Markup Language, was designed to facilitate the data sharing across different information systems, particularly systems connected via the Internet.)

 

Manufacturers have also adapted to the plant environment by making cameras more robust. According to Lewis with Cognex, inspecting text is difficult because of poor lighting, high line speeds and quick changeovers. Cognex has even developed vision sensors with stainless steel casings to expedite washdowns when companies changeover their lines.

With products being shipped to markets across the world (often from the same packaging line), optical character recognition and optical character verification platforms now recognize foreign languages and can interface between them.

But companies are hesitant to rely 100% on machines. According to Lee, a human-machine interface is key to developing the right solution, and all components of the inspection system need to communicate. A printer control system makes sure there are stored options that can compare what’s actually been printed with master copies.

“In a lot of the previous vision solutions, there’s no feedback from what’s been printed tied back to the inspection system,” Lee says. “Our customers are requesting solutions with a closed feedback loop.”

 

For the vision system department at Systech, increased federal mandates on labeling are only one issue to consider. Pharmaceutical companies are now contacting them with requests for label inspection systems on clinical trial products. Each package has a unique label that needs to be checked and double-checked.

“They’ll run 1,000 labels, and each label has a unique decoration,” says Mike Soborski, director of inspection solutions for Systech.

The inspection system is used to check the general print quality and the artwork, among other components. Soborski says they’re now treating the entire label as critical copy.

The increased use of flexible packaging has also created a challenge for manufacturers to develop vision systems that recognize and accept slight variations in label presentation while detecting errors.

“We’re not dealing with a rigid surface,” Soborski says. “We have flexible materials that are bumpy, and that creates for variations in the label. We have had to develop vision technologies that are able to account for those variations and detect them as variations as opposed to poor quality.”

Developing complex algorithms that account for the “bumps” has also been a recent push at Cognex, according to DeFrance.

“When a package is dimpled or wrinkled, lighting can bounce around all over the place and that can really pose a problem,” he says.

Some companies have benefited by moving their production lines upstream—a change made possible through the creation of content management systems and flexible vision sensors.

“To catch a mistake once it’s been printed is inefficient,” Perlis says. “The earlier a mistake is caught, the cheaper it is to fix it. Our technologies can be used anywhere from the first artwork creation through regulatory and marketing to make sure that nothing has changed throughout the process.”

 

As printing technology improves, product producers will be able to print and inspect labels further upstream as part of the mainstream packaging process. Printing and inspecting labels right on the line increases speed and reduces error.

Processing speeds are no longer holding back increased efficiency, but inspection can only go as fast as the images taken by the cameras are acquired.

“We’re working to try and figure out ways to bring images in with higher fidelity and get images into the host memory quicker,” Soborski with Systech says.

“Customers don’t want to go to one HMI (Human Machine Interface) vendor, another PLC (Programmable Logic Controller) vendor and another vision vendor, because once they have all of the pieces, they don’t want to think about how they could interface all of them together,” Omron’s Lee says. “They want an all-in-one-box solution.”

“There’s definitely a demand for factories to be controlled by an office remotely in order to see what’s going on from a whole different continent,” DeFrance says. “We support Ethernet, Modbus and standard field-bus protocols right now, and it’s becoming a prevailing demand.”