GigE camera monitors medical mail

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.

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.