Glass is the packaging par excellence of the beverage industry, but also one of the most demanding to inspect: reflections, transparency and cylindrical shapes complicate control. Machine vision systems for glass bottles solve that challenge by verifying every unit in-line. Let’s look at what they inspect and why they matter.
The challenges of glass
A glass bottle generates reflections and glare that hinder vision, and its round shape requires 360° inspection. With the right lighting and software, machine vision overcomes these difficulties and examines the whole container at line speed. Glass is also a 100 % recyclable material, as the European Container Glass Federation (FEVE) notes.
What a bottle vision system inspects
- Fill level: that the drink reaches the correct height.
- Label and back label: presence, position, reference and coding (see also our 360° label inspector).
- Cap and closure: presence and correct seating.
- Glass defects: breakage, neck or base cracks, foreign bodies and dirt.
Applications in beverages
Wine, water, soft drinks, beer or spirits share the same checks: making sure every bottle ships full, labelled, sealed and defect-free. It’s a concrete machine vision case you can see applied in our article on machine vision in the wine industry.
Benefits
Inspecting 100 %, cutting complaints and waste, guaranteeing traceability and protecting brand image, without slowing high-throughput lines.
At AIS Vision Systems we design custom machine vision and verification systems for bottling lines. Tell us about your line and we’ll propose the solution.