BLUEIGHT TECHNOLOGY becomes HSL
Following the great success of the SPRAY optical sorting machine to eliminate insects and foreign bodies from leaf vegetables (salads and spinach), RAYTEC has opened a new frontier in the field of optical sorting by developing the best solution for the recognition of sanitary defects: BLUEIGHT technology.
Blue light highlights the most hidden defects in food products, to allow for a detailed analysis that has been impossible up to now using traditional “white” light.
BLUEIGHT is used to detect sanitary defects in very transparent products such as spinach leaves, but can also detect defects such as albinism on raspberries and many others besides which, due to their low consistency or high transparency, were until now invisible using multi-frequency optical analysis techniques.
Using Blueight it is now possible to:
· Sort salad mixes, applying various sorting windows to compliant Red and compliant Green Leaves.
· Sort salads with ridges or white roots without reducing the sensitivity to chlorophyll retention.
· Eliminate yellow leaves or those with sanitary defects.
· Add the control of the foreign bodies of any kind or colour to the analysis, including leaf “freshness” controls.
The BLUEIGHT era must however be considered as only just beginning. The huge possibilities introduced with the application of BLUE LEDs will radically change the working philosophy of optical sorters. Until today, these technologies were used to remove all objects that did not have the optical characteristics of only one, “good”, reference product.
BLUEIGHT, on the other hand, can be used to remove all objects with optical characteristics (colour, consistency, transparency, chlorophyll) that lie outside of a database of optical characteristics relative to more than one reference product. This database contains “windows” of compliance for each product-specific optical characteristic.
BLUEIGHT goes beyond the concept of Threshold and introduces the concept of Window.
All of this multiplies by eight, as there are indeed eight optical characteristics that the BLUEIGHT analyses in any product controlled.
As the wealth of available information increases, making the Blueight system extremely powerful, the inspection system configuration will need to become increasingly intuitive, particularly in terms of colour management. Raytec is answering this need by introducing its Blueight technology systems with a new HSL-type management system.
The coloured artificial vision systems process information concerning the colour of the object through the separate acquisition of three components corresponding to the primary colours Red, Green and Blue (RGB). In human |
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experience, on the other hand, the distinction of colour is mainly linked to the perception of the characteristics of shade, luminosity and purity of the colour.
The HSL system introduced by Raytec in its own systems allows for the artificial management of colour that is closer to human perception, decoupling the information concerning shade from saturation and luminosity, in a quantitative and repeatable manner. In this system, saturation indicates how 'bright’ or 'washed out' a colour is, and luminosity represents the total quantity of light in all the three visible components R,G, B, and is zero for black; shade on the other hand is the essence of the colour (for example, yellow, red, green, violet, …).
In this way it is possible to create an effective sorting programme in a very intuitive manner, to discriminate two different colours, or two shades of a similar colour but with different levels of saturation.
It is clear that through the effective colour discrimination skills and the ease with which the parameters can be fine-tuned, the HSL system constitutes a further step forward in the application of ready-to-use vegetable automatic inspection systems. The HSL system and the Blueight technology make it possible to inspect ready-to-use products highly effectively, not only to eliminate foreign organic and inorganic bodies (an application for which Raytec has always been considered a reference point), but also to remove product quality defects.
The technological innovations introduced by Raytec do not end here. To satisfy the production requests of the United States and Russia, we have created an new multi-frequency optical sorting machine with camera which doubles the production capacity of the SPRAY model.
A new sorting machine
The new system, christened DISCOVERY, also has the possibility of using BLUEIGHT technology and can be fitted with both cameras and a Laser lighting system.
This technology has been carefully studied by Raytec and will be fitted on the DISCOVERY only once the clear advantages in terms of efficiency have been fully verified and ascertained.
DISCOVERY was designed to sort 3 tonnes of leaf vegetables per hour, opening the door to the large US ready-to-serve salad producers and European producers of frozen spinach.
Blueight technology make it possible to inspect ready-to-use products highly effectively, not only to eliminate foreign organic and inorganic bodies (an application for which Raytec has always been considered a reference point), but also to remove product quality defects.
The technological innovations introduced by Raytec do not end here. To satisfy the production requests of the United States and Russia, we have created an new multi-frequency optical sorting machine with camera which doubles the production capacity of the SPRAY model.
A new sorting machine
The new system, christened DISCOVERY, also has the possibility of using BLUEIGHT technology and can be fitted with both cameras and a Laser lighting system.
This technology has been carefully studied by Raytec and will be fitted on the DISCOVERY only once the clear advantages in terms of efficiency have been fully verified and ascertained.
DISCOVERY was designed to sort 3 tonnes of leaf vegetables per hour, opening the door to the large US ready-to-serve salad producers and European producers of frozen spinach.
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