Stemmer Imaging has won the award for the Most Innovative Machine Vision Project 2013, which is part of the Processing and Packaging Machinery Association Group Awards.
Stemmer was nominated for its work in the development of the imaging system for the C-Cell bread and baked product quality assessment system, manufactured by Calibre Control International.
With the judges looking for an application that increased productivity while also considering design, safety and creativity, Stemmer was declared the winner for ‘not only picking up an existing project, but completely overhauling it, thanks to a depth of understanding of the particular application’.
C-Cell produces images of crumb cell structure and distribution in baked products such as breads, buns, pastries, cakes, snack foods, pizza and even extruded products. Originally developed in prototype form by Campden BRI, UK's largest independent research and development organisation, C-Cell was commercialised by Calibre Control International.
When Campden BRI decided it could no longer provide software support for the product, Calibre turned to Stemmer to take over support for the code and carry out a complete review of the machine vision configuration used.
Stemmer completely transformed the image acquisition process within the C-Cell instrument by using the popular GigE Vision imaging standard, improved illumination and updated control code to create a machine vision configuration which delivers all the needs of the application. It establishes a hardware independence that removes the need to use a given component from any one supplier, while providing the flexibility for future developments.
Mark Williamson, director for corporate market development at Stemmer said: 'We are delighted to win this prestigious award, following on from our success in the partnership award category last year. This is a fitting recognition of the depth of technical expertise that we can offer and the relationships that we establish with our customers.'
