FEATURE Packaging Image ©Jiangrun INCREASE LABEL
MVTec HALCON vision software is helping improve accuracy levels in pharmaceutical product labelling and packaging
D
ue to strict compliance regulations, packaging for medical products must be correctly labelled before it is
delivered to customers. For this purpose, the Chinese company Shenzhen Jiangrun Xuneng Technology has developed a sophisticated machine vision solution that automatically reads character codes using OCR. At the heart of the application is the standard machine vision software MVTec HALCON. This improve product quality. According to Good Manufacturing Practice (GMP), products must be manufactured to consistently high quality standards. Accordingly, the guidelines impose strict requirements on the documentation of Regular checks are intended to ensure The global health and food company GMP: in order to reliably comply with the regulations, the manufacturer must correctly label the packaging of its medical and cosmetic products. For this purpose, various information such as batch number, date of manufacture, and expiration date are printed on the cartons. The character combinations must be correct and complete. This is the only way to ensure that products can be correctly regard to labelling are consistently met. It is therefore essential to check the character codes carefully before the cartons leave the factory and are delivered to customers. Until now, this control process at the H&H
Group was carried out purely manually, which proved to be very costly and time- consuming. Due to the high number of packages and the fast cycle rate, inspection could often only be carried out on a random basis. In some cases, this led to incorrectly labelled products being delivered to wholesalers and other customers. As a result, complaints and grievances piled up, leading
18 February 2026 | Automation
INCREASE LABEL INSPECTION EFFICIENCY
SPECTION EFFICIENCY
serious damage to the company’s image. In order to improve the quality of product labelling, the inspection process had to managers at the H&H Group commissioned Shenzhen Jiangrun Xuneng Technology to develop an appropriate solution. The machine vision platform enables the visual inspection of product labels on packaging to be fully automated. The letter-number combinations are read and checked using modern optical character recognition (OCR) technologies. “This application presented us with major challenges. The characters printed on the cartons are usually encrypted, with The characters are often not located exactly addition, the letters and numbers are often printed incorrectly, unclearly, or blurred on the packaging, which can lead to problems in clearly recognising the codes,” explained King Wang, technical application engineer at Jiangrun.
Another challenge is the fast cycle rate of be read and checked at high speed in order to achieve maximum product throughput. This requires comprehensive preprocessing by the OCR algorithms. This is the only way ensuring the highest possible recognition of characters. Jiangrun’s machine vision platform allows these complex requirements to be addressed with precision. The standard machine vision software products MVTec HALCON are used for this purpose. The HALCON algorithms are used for pre- and post-processing of the
and localisation of characters. The software reference line to determine the exact position of the characters. In the process, a region of numbers and letters, such as an expiration date or batch designation, are recognised, read, and checked. By comparing them with reference characters, errors in the labelling can be reliably detected.
“Thanks to MVTec HALCON, we were reduce the costs for development, operation, and maintenance of our machine vision we are able to implement dynamic optical character recognition with high stability and processing speed. New types of products, to the application. This allows us to optimise results even with display errors or incorrectly positioned characters,” says King Wang. H&H Group can also automate the entire inspection process and relieve its employees of tedious manual work. This improves maintains the quality of product labels at a consistently high level. As a result, the number of customer complaints is reduced to a minimum and the brand’s image is enhanced. Based on the successful collaboration, Jiangrun plans to implement further image processing applications with MVTec HALCON in the future.
MVTec
www.mvtec.com/products/halcon
automationmagazine.co.uk
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