Matrox Imaging has introduced Matrox SureDotOCR, an Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology designed to address the challenges of using inkjet-printed, dot-matrix text in vision inspection applications.
The OCR technology will be used particularly on packaging lines in the food, beverage, pharmaceutical and healthcare sectors.
Planned to be made available first as an add-on to Matrox Imaging Library (MIL) 10 machine vision software by the end of Q2 2016, the SureDotOCR will be licensed with MIL's solid-stroke String Reader OCR tool without additional cost.
The MIL is a collection of software tools for developing machine vision, image analysis and medical imaging applications. The tools feature interactive software and programming functions for image capture, processing, analysis, annotation, display and archiving.
The SureDotOCR technology will enable packaging line equipment builders to design inspection systems which can reliably read information printed by industrial inkjet printers despite text distortion and orientation, Matrox said.
Matrox Imaging sales and marketing director Sam Lopez said: "Equipment makers and integrators, especially those serving the packaging industry, are eagerly anticipating SureDotOCR so they can finally offer a more reliable and universal solution for reading product identification information printed as dot-matrix text.
"SureDotOCR is easy to use; it requires minimal tuning for particular conditions and it's robust enough to handle all commonly encountered circumstances that make vison applications that need to do dot-matrix text reading challenging."
By simply specifying the expected dot size and dimensions of a box framing the entire text of interest, the SureDotOCR will handle non-uniform dot spacing; deformed, skewed and touching characters; rotated text strings; varying contrast; uneven backgrounds and other anomalies.
Additionally, the software accepts grammar rules including letter only, digit only, specific letters), specific digit(s), specific punctuation mark(s) and other designations at each character position to further enhance reading accuracy.
Mettler-Toledo SBU Vision Inspection R&D head Tobias Vancura said: "We are thrilled to see the release of Matrox's much anticipated and innovative OCR technology because it will be a major enhancement to our CIVCore platform, finally allowing us to confidently address a significant packaging inspection requirement."
Image: The Matrox's SureDotOCR software will be made available initially as an add-on to Matrox Imaging Library (MIL) 10 machine vision software. Photo: courtesy of Matrox.
