U.S. Develops Drug Label Sensors

DPT Pharmaceuticals, located in San Antonio, USA, recently put a drug label sensor system into the production line to increase work efficiency and reduce production costs.
DPT Pharmaceuticals is a well-known manufacturer of pharmaceuticals and cosmetics. The company's feedback from sales channels shows that there are often cases where the front and back labels on bottles of drugs are badly labelled or missing. The work of inspecting labels has always been visually inspected by workers on the production line, and then packaged into the library, so it is inevitable mistakes. In order to automate this process and reduce or even eliminate such situations, the plant set up a research team to carry out technical reforms.
The research team has evaluated and evaluated various visual sensing systems. From the considerations of installation cost, maintenance cost, ease of operation, and reliability, they finally selected the Minnesota Signal Engineering Corporation's pixel number sensor system. This sensor system is similar to the fiber-optic sensor system. A photoelectric sensor triggers the detection of electrical appliances when the vial enters and detects the positioning of the vial. However, unlike the single-point optical fiber system, the pixel count sensor can scan approximately 3.2 cm. The 2.5cm area, this feature, greatly increases the flexibility of the sensor system, and it is not necessary to constantly adjust the position of the sensor due to the change of the product on the production line.
The pixel count sensor can change the single-sided information in the 3.2cm × 2.5cm area of ​​the vial side wall into 512 × 384 pixels grayscale and images. After this image is properly calculated by the system, the grayscale image is changed to a grayscale image. For black images, the conversion result depends on the set value, which can be adjusted by the user. The sensor system can calculate the number and distribution of black and white pixels to determine whether the vial label is acceptable by the internal circuit.
At present, DPT Pharmaceuticals has 20 sets of such sensor systems on the production line. The advantages of this sensor system are significant for three shifts and eight shifts per shift. The reliability is high, and labor costs are high. Low, adaptable. Since there are as many as four product changes per class on the production line and the vials and labels have to be changed, the flexibility and simplicity of this system are reflected: as long as the product is changed every time, in the production line At the same time, several labeled and unlabeled vials were placed on each, and the sensor system was “taught” or “failed” by a push-button teaching box, so that the sensor system was rebuilt. The qualified or unqualified standard of the product's vial label can be used to continuously operate the product line. The entire teaching process can be completed with a simple button, and once the result of the teaching process is over and the system is operating normally, the teaching box will not work.
The successful application of this system was greatly encouraged by the research team. At present, they are reassessing the system in order to find new application areas for them, such as checking the bar code on the label of the vials and the print quality of the production date.