System boosts web inspection

The growing quality requirements of reprocessing mills and end-product users are pushing web-inspection system developers to increase the spatial and gray-scale resolutions of their systems. Normally, a single-camera solution would not be able to find the variety of defects that mills must identify, and, therefore several cameras with dedicated software have been used. To meet this challenge, ABB, Process Industry (Helsinki, Finland; www.abb.com/pulpandpaper) has recently released the single-sensor Web Imaging Solution HDI 8 with on-board FPGA, Power PC processor, and custom software. The camera captures images, detects defects, and performs image-analysis and classification tasks using a neural-network-based classifier.