In this work, a vision system specifically designed to monitor the labels on bottling lines for wine production industries is presented. The system is based on smart cameras, Real Time LabView sofware and IMAQ vision libraries. The work has been developed in the frame of a thesis work, in collaboration with Studio Progetti Automation srl (Italy). 

Bottling lines for wine are complex systems, which provide bottle rinsing, filling, capping, labelling, wrapping and pallettising. In this work, a vision system has been studied and implemented for the automatic control of the labelling machine. The bottling line, that is installed at Cantine Leonardo da Vinci (Tuscan, Italy), is characterized by a high level of automation, and is able to output 10.000 bottles per hour. However, the labeling machine is completely operator-dependant: three blocks of labels must be manually positioned on the machine for each wine brand. These are the front label, the back label and the DOCG label. The position of the labels with respect to the bottles is visually controlled and adjusted by the operators.

Due to human errors, it is possible that the operator mount on the machine labels corresponding to a wine brand different with respect to the one programmed on the bottling line. Early detection of this situation is mandatory to reduce downtime and, in the worse case, to avoid that the whole bottling process is performed from scratch.