The firm undertook a feasibility study that imaged the sandwich through the 'clear' plastic packaging, while the label on the packaging was also read.
Reproducible identification of sandwich contents and bread types was achieved using the Manto pattern recognition tool, which is part of Stemmer's Common Vision Blox hardware independent machine vision toolkit. Manto is an object recognition tool that uses a neural technology from research into artificial intelligence, especially statistical learning theory.
Manto differs from other pattern recognition approaches because it allows, among other things, the recognition of organic forms and textures that show a high level of distortion or that are hard to reproduce.
This makes it well-suited to this application as it copes with applications where other methods of pattern recognition fail. In the feasibility study, the system was successfully trained to recognise cheese ploughman's; cheese and celery; and cheese and bacon club sandwiches.
Contact: Stemmer Imaging Tel: 01252 780000