Success stories
Identification of esthetic serigraphy errors in Flamagas
Flamagas is a Spanish company with international presence dedicated to the manufacture and marketing of lighters. Flamagas’ flagship product is undoubtedly the well-known Clipper lighters. A product that has ended up being sold all over the world.
01. Challenge
The lighter screen printing process is a very fast process capable of generating a huge number of finished products per minute. This speed is, at the same time, the cause of some of the screen prints not coming out correctly. This is due to displacement, stains or other defects.
Quality control was done manually and in a generalised way, with operators looking at some of the screen-printed lighters in a generic way. The visual inspection was aesthetically based and totally subjective.
The aim was to have a system capable of interpreting whether screen printing is good or not based on aesthetic and not metrological criteria, since each drawing is different.
02. Solution
The use of interpretive algorithms and computer visiontechniques allows the classification of the images taken as good or bad. All thanks to the training of the algorithm, previously carried out by the technicians.
A system with an online camera was developed, within the screen printing station, capable of capturing continuous images of all processed lighters. It is the algorithm itself that classifies the image taken as good or bad and sends the order to continue processing the product or to eject it from the production cycle.
In addition, it is a self-adaptive system, capable of re-training with new data, thus allowing it to be more or less demanding with the quality of the screen printing.
The system has made it possible to have a standardized and agilequality control process forlighter screen printing.
