March 4, 2016 - Matrox Imaging introduced Matrox SureDotOCR, designed to overcome the challenges of using inkjet-printed, dot-matrix text in vision inspection applications, particularly on packaging lines in the food, beverage, pharmaceutical and healthcare sectors. SureDotOCR is an add-on tool to Matrox Imaging Library (MIL) machine vision software.
Existing solutions for reading dot-matrix product identification information such as manufacturing date, expiry date, lot size and product number are limited because they involve case-specific image pre-processing to form solid-stroked text prior to using traditional OCR. SureDotOCR requires simply specifying the expected dot size and dimensions of a box framing the entire text of interest.
The software handles non-uniform dot spacing; deformed, skewed and touching characters; rotated text strings; varying contrast; uneven backgrounds and other anomalies. SureDotOCR also accepts grammar rules such as letter only, digit only, specific letter(s), specific digit(s), specific punctuation mark(s) and other designations at each character position to further enhance reading accuracy. SureDotOCR lets users define the expected dot-matrix character font but also includes predefined fonts.
