Tracking of Material in Steel Plants with the Help of Image

by Matthias Knoke

Publisher - LogoTek GmbH

Category - General Novel

With increased quality requirements failure free material tracking is getting a higher importance in steel plants worldwide. Material mix-ups can create high costs and damage the customer confidence seriously. The safe way to avoid this is a gapless material tracking. Camera based vision systems meanwhile can replace classical tracking solutions for steel products in the harsh environment of a steel plant. Main benefit of vision technologies is the ability of the system to “see” what happens with the material. Tracking can be performed on basis of a set of information derived from the camera picture thus making the tracking more fail safe than the traditional solution with lots of light barriers, encoders and proximity switches. Not only the material location, but also the dimension can be considered, and so it is easily possible to find material mismatches and mix-ups. Further benefits are the simplified sensor installation and the low maintenance effort. This paper describes actual developments and successful project implementations in the field of optical tracking systems for the steel industry.

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