Biscuit Quality Control
Fazer Biscuit Ltd. makes serveral varietiess of deliecious premium and cream-filled biscuits. It is part of the multinational United Biscuits Ltd. and they are well known for their biscuits around the world.
Over the last few years the factory in Vantaa, Finland has been increasing its production capacity radically and Fazer is invertigating the protential for the colour line scanning equipment to obtain on-line quality control at different positions on the production lines.
Problems
Measuring the baking color is difficult because it has to be measured near the end of the baking oven, which is very hot. The biscuits can be very light or very dark, Measuring both light and dark biscuits requires equipment with a high dynamic range. The baking color is permited to very very little, meaning that the equipment has to be extremely stable over a long period. The other problem is to measure physical defects during production.Errors may occur during the assembly of sandwich biscuits, typically misalignment of the upper and lower biscuits, cracks, missing filling, etc. If the misalignment is too great, a biscuit can jam packaging equipment or prevent the package from being closed properly. Typically the equipment should be able to measure 60 biscuuits per second.
Feasibility study
The main goal of this feasibillity study was to find out where color machine vision can be used effiectively in a production plant for controlling the quality of different kinds of biscuits.The study is limited to biscuit process line and does not include further handling such as packaging. This project was mainly studying the products to determine the kinds of defects that can occur in manufacturing biscuits.