The produce industry is moving to implement a systematic, industrywide approach to closely track where fresh produce comes from and where it goes. One of the great challenges in this effort is the automatic recognition of a wide range of different package designs and hand stamps currently used to provide information about the produce.

Sun Pacific, the largest grower, packer, and marketer of citrus fruits in the United States, recently overcame this challenge by implementing the HarvestMark Product Traceability Initiative (PTI) solution with Saber Engineering VR-3000 vision inspection systems in several of its packing houses. These systems utilize Cognex PatMax pattern recognition technology to consistently recognize case designs and hand stamps in spite of varying case positions and orientations, changes in ambient lighting, and other variables.

 …