Solocap / Aprex Track IA: practical case of quality control in the plastics industry

Solocap sets its sights on cork control

Detecting tears and micro-tears in plastic closures of 40 different colours and shades, moving at high speed along a production line, was the quality control objective set by SOLOCAP Mab (1).
APREX Solutions successfully met the challenge.

SOLOCAP's Contrexéville plant produces all types of plastic closures for the food sector, including a top-of-the-range screw cap suitable for all glass and PET bottles.
Thanks to a ring of wings that can be clipped around the neck of the bottle, this cap makes crimping easy, fast, completely watertight and secure.
To achieve this, the fins must be systematically and reliably inspected for cracks, tears and torsion at a sustained rate during production.
As the old system did not meet the new requirements, it was essential to modernise the control process.

Concerted specifications

The specifications were developed in conjunction with the SOLOCAP team and we deployed our solution in two stages:
Initially, with our APREX Track IA solution, we created the specific application "bouchon-Solocap". This application interweaves various object detector, classifier and standard methods working at different scales to deliver a final compliance result.
That's almost 5 levels of control, with multiple checkpoints, giving a reliability rate of over 99.99%.

In a second phase, we implemented this application on the production line with APREX Track C&M. This makes it possible to control its execution by linking an IDS Imaging (2) UI 3280 CP HQ camera, Effiring efflux lighting and an industrial PLC.  It also enables traceability data to be recorded in real time.

The excellent colour rendering and resolution of 5.01 Mpx with a frame rate of 26 fps enabled us to complete this project quickly. Without requiring any specific development other than a quick training of the AI methods, the APREX TRACK software suite made it possible to obtain an efficient and scalable result, in complete simplicity.

Testimonies cross

Romain Baude – Founder of APREX solutions

"The difficulty of this project lay above all in the very fine nature of the defects sought and the multitude of colours. With our software suite, it was possible to set up a vision application quickly. Despite its complexity."

Anthony Vastel – Directeur Technique et industriel de SOLOCAP

"APREX's approach and their AI-based solution have opened new doors for our 100% vision-based quality control. Our requirements in terms of product safety, but also rejection control, particularly in the event of false positives, were quickly met. We are convinced that we can go even further by continuing to improve the efficiency of the system at SOLOCAP and transferring it to other production lines."

(1) SOLOCAP, based in Contrexéville, is a subsidiary of La Maison Mélan Moutet, a French family firm specialising in the manufacture of corks for food packaging, which has been "conditioning taste since 1880".
(2) IDS Imaging, based in Germany, is a major player specialising in industrial cameras.