Postal & Parcel Inspection

Automation is vital to modern postal and parcel sorting. While 1D and 2D bar codes have simplified retail scanning, manufacturers of postal sorting equipment must deal with much more challenging conditions and targets. Postal/parcel inspection systems typically still lift an image of an entire address (possibly handwritten) from letters, magazines, and parcels and use sophisticated algorithms to interpret it and automatically send the item down the correct path. One of the challenges is the variation in parcel height, which makes it challenging to capture a focused image. Stopping down a lens to give a larger depth of field reduces the amount of light through the aperture, making it hard to capture a clear image at high speed. Another challenge is the variation in the addresses themselves--even a clear image can require extensive real-time processing to compensate for rotation and skew as well as missing, obscured, or damaged areas before performing decoding or OCR.

Teledyne's high speed, large resolution line scan and TDI line scan cameras enable inspection systems to easily capture barcodes on any parcel. The huge advantages in sensitivity provided by TDI (often 100x more sensitive than traditional line scan) allows truly superior speed and image quality, even with stopped down lenses, and without the need for expensive, high-power illumination.

Downstream, Teledyne's extensive range of framegrabbers and vision processors harness torrents of data from almost any manufacturer's cameras. Teledyne's Xtium and Xtium2 framegrabbers deliver leading-edge performance to accelerate inspection system decisions.