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February 04, 2020

Satake Smart Sensitivity offers new possibilities for optical sorting

by Nobuyoshi “Nick” Ikeda, Assistant Manager, Technical Division, Satake Corporation, Japan

Electric Sorting Machine Company (ESM), a Michigan based company later acquired by Satake, developed the world’s first optical sorter approximately 90 years ago. Since then, optical sorters have been used in various industries such as rice milling, flour milling, tree nuts processing, etc.
 


Optical sorter performance has improved year on year by adopting various new technologies available. Among the technological innovations contributing to the improvement, image processing technology is a feature that has tended to be overlooked. However, the effective utilisation of information from modern optics such as higher than 2K pixel high-resolution cameras, IR cameras, and full-color cameras, is one of the key features directly affecting sorting performance by helping determine both good product and defects - often referred to as accepts and rejects respectively.

The more information the optical sorter receives from the optics, the more the sorting parameters and criteria can be set, and as a result, the better the sorting performance it can achieve. On the other hand, it may create more confusion to the human operators to adjust or set the equipment due to multiple complex parameters.

Satake Smart Sensitivity (3S) developed by Satake in 2011, is an innovative solution to the above problems and offers not only hassle-free equipment adjustment and setting but also provides better sorting performance than optical sorters with traditional image-processing technology.

Normally, the adjustment of the optical sorter is done by setting a sensitivity to tell the equipment what it needs to separate. The adjustment process is like drawing a border between the information signal of the good products and the defective product, then accepts and rejects respectively.


Read more HERE.
 

The Global Miller
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