All this is quite a feat, as Rademaker's croissant-automation equipment is capable of producing 24,000 croissants per hour.

Bakers have responded to the system as a curiosity, Riggle says. Rademaker has sold systems in France and Belgium, where bakers are interested in baking automation because labor rates are higher than in the United States, he adds.

The croissant vision system is not cheap, Riggle says, though putting a dollar amount on it is hard because these systems are customized to bakers' needs. Because the Rademaker production line that includes the vision system can produce 24,000 croissants per hour, buyers need to compare cost savings with that of maintaining six to 10 operators on the line to manually form croissants.

One other important point making for slow adoption: U.S. consumers aren't as zealously dedicated to their croissants as the French, which means a smaller stateside market for wholesale croissant baking equipment in general.

“In France, the croissant is like what white bread is here,” Riggle says.

Nevertheless, he's confident vision systems have a place in U.S. croissant production. They can cut operating costs and ensure a uniform and accurately folded product. Also, the vision systems will soon make their way into other Rademaker applications, such as aiding the manipulation of pizza dough.

Packaging inspection

At Cognex Corp., Natick, Mass., the vision hardware and software is integrated in one package. Bakers then program the system for their own needs.

“Our systems can be made to display a picture or a message to an operator, but they can also be more complex,” says Lisa Eichler, director of marketing, vision systems. “They can talk to the controller on the line that controls all the equipment or they can talk to a robot to tell it where the bag of chips is that it needs to put in a carton. Or they can talk to a software package that controls many different type of devices.”

The company already routinely provides vision systems for a variety of baking applications. For example, Manner AG, Perg, Austria makes a variety of wafers, biscuits and cookies. The company's large baking oven produces 8,000 tons of flat wafers and biscuits each year.

To ensure the packages of all varieties of its century-old Manner wafers are consistent and undamaged, the company recently implemented a vision sensor called the In-Sight 5400 and combined it with PatMax pattern-matching technology on its packaging line. Both hardware and software is from Cognex. The software and hardware combination allows many different package characteristics to be checked simultaneously and quickly, says Reinhard Gassner, Manner's plant manager. Now, Manner is capable of maintaining packaging speeds of up to 400 packages per minute. The wafer itself is packaged in many different package varieties.

“If the conveyor belt is operating at a speed of 270 packages per minute, then just a few seconds of defective production means several dozen rejected packages,” Gassner says. “This is not just a question of cost; it also has a negative effect on the production flow.”

The vision system is programmed to recognize each package, no matter where it sits on the line and to detect any fault in the packaging itself, Gassner adds. The pattern-matching software pairs the actual packaging the vision system sees against its knowledge of how the package should look. In this way, it recognizes appearance defects. With the system in place, individual packages of wafers flow through the inspection station on the conveyor belt without needing to be fixed in a particular position.

The system can determine whether the packaging is centered correctly and wraps the product properly. It also can determine the presence of the hazelnut picture on the wafer wrapper, for example, thus ensuring wafer packages correspond to the wafer type inside. The system also checks packages for dents and tears.