Vision technology in food slicing!

Stemmer Imaging wins Partnership Award 2012 From PPMA

Stemmer Imaging has won the prestigious Partnership Award 2012 from the Processing and Packaging Machinery Association (PPMA) for the provision of vision technology for use in food slicing machines manufactured by Marel. Marel is a leading global provider of advanced equipment, systems and services to the fish, meat and poultry industries.

Stemmer Imaging has been a provider of vision technology for the Marel range of slicing products developed in Norwich (GB) for around 14 years. Vision specialists from Stemmer Imaging have worked closely with experts from Marel to develop a system that would enable a wider range of larger products to be processed with greater accuracy. Key facets of the projects have been the selection of the most appropriate cameras and the development of a suitable image processing methodology using Stemmer Imaging’s versatile Common Vision Blox machine vision toolkit.

Mark Williamson, Director of Corporate Development at Stemmer Imaging, said: “Receiving this accolade rewards the really close levels of co-operation we have had with Marel who are one of our strategic OEM partners. We have worked to help them develop a flexible, patented solution that has been adopted on a range of commercially available high speed, high volume, continuous feed slicer products. The system measures the area, lean/fat ratio and the lean/fat structure and takes into account their different densities before adjusting the thickness of the next slice and providing grading information to labelling technology down the line. By delivering the vision subsystem pre-configured and tested, we are also removing Marel’s need for post design engineering inherent when using fast changing PC based technology.”

Peter Jongen, R&D Engineering Manager at Marel, said: “Our partnership with Stemmer Imaging in vision technology has strengthened our competitiveness and enabled us to bring a new grading technology to our customers”.

The Judging Panel commented: “STEMMER was the clear favourite for this award for its outstanding partnership with Marel in a highly competitive sector of the industry. We particularly commend STEMMER for refusing to rest on its laurels and for continuing to develop new technologies.”

Stemmer Imaging also achieved ‘highly commended’ status in the Customer Service Award category – another of the PPMA Group Industry Awards.