tech applications - Overview of machine vision applications in the tobacco industry

Since machine vision systems entered the domestic market, it can be said that they have been widely used so far. The five major technologies of identification, detection, positioning, measurement, and sorting occupy an important position in the field of automated production and processing . Machine vision technology has brought profound changes to traditional industries. Industrial sorting, as one of the mature application fields of machine vision technology, well reflects this change. The sorting system equipped with visual recognition equipment is flexible and efficient, and is widely used in food and drug production, mechanical processing, chip manufacturing and other fields.

Looking at the current development status of the industry, the application of machine vision systems in the tobacco industry ranges from the detection and sorting of raw materials to the storage and transportation of tobacco products, and its technology is constantly improving. Machine vision system sorting technology can realize automated production of foreign matter removal in the tobacco industry, greatly improving work efficiency. At present, the tobacco industry has gradually begun to introduce machine vision technology to ensure the processing quality of products. Its application scope involves tobacco leaf grading, foreign matter removal, appearance defect detection, and packaging defect detection. In these applications, foreign matter removal is the basic and most critical step to ensure product quality.

Tobacco leaves are the soul of tobacco products. During the picking, baking, packaging, transportation and other operations, it is inevitable that some impurities will be mixed with them. If these impurities are mixed with tobacco leaves and made into tobacco products, they will affect the quality of the product and the taste of the finished product. What's more, they will be inhaled into the lungs of the user and cause personal injury. Therefore, the process of removing foreign matter from tobacco leaves is very important.

In the early days, manual removal was mostly used, which had low efficiency, poor accuracy, and slow speed; later, metal detectors were used, but this was only a method used to remove metal debris. Until now, the application of detection technology based on machine vision systems has improved recognition capabilities, work efficiency, accuracy, and detection range.

The application of machine vision systems in the foreign matter removal process was first realized in the United States in the 1980s. Although it started late in China, it has developed very rapidly. The camera in the machine vision system is mainly used to collect images and capture real-time images of tobacco leaves. The image processing software can detect and identify based on characteristics.

The intelligent foreign matter removal system is not only a machine vision system, but also requires intelligent processing in the early conveying process and post-processing process. The feeding conveyor is a relatively advanced conveying machine currently used. Its main function is to spread the tobacco leaves during the transportation process while maintaining smooth operation, and try to avoid overlapping phenomena, which is conducive to the detection of foreign matter. In the final processing step, the foreign matter information is fed back by the image processing software to automatically eliminate the foreign matter.