Development of automatic inspection technology for label printing

1.1 Status of Automatic Appearance Inspection at FUJITSU TEN At manufacturing sites of FUJITSU TEN, to improve the external appearance of our products intended for the customers and to ensure the visual quality of our products, various inspections are performed. Conventionally, a visual inspection had been performed by inspectors. However, recently, to ensure the stability of the inspection quality and to reduce the man-hours consumed by the visual inspection, an automatic inspection using a camera and image processing has been introduced. So far, FUJITSU TEN has developed the automatic judging technologies using image processing for missing / incorrect part inspection methods, for confirming contents of printed matters/display objects, and for automatically determining whether a processing state or an assembly state is acceptable or not, and these technologies are already widely used at respective production sites (Fig. 1). However, under the circumstances, sensory inspections relating to human sensitivity such as printing failures, scars and color shifts are not automated yet, and these are visually inspected by inspectors.