The production of cork stoppers is based on a manual punching process. A skilled operator performs a rapid visual inspection of the raw material to determine the location of defects and then punches the stoppers one at a time, avoiding those defects which he considers detrimental to the stoppers. This paper presents a machine which has been developed to punch stoppers in a completely automatic way. The machine employs a vision and image processing system which can detect defects and generate a corresponding punching pattern in a way which emulates the conventional manual process. Two monochrome CCD cameras and an image processing board are used to acquire and process the necessary visual information about the raw cork material. The algorithms implemented in the vision system are described, together with the image processing hardware. First results obtained with the machine are presented and a comparison with the manual method is made. This development work was carried out under a contract between LNETI, a government research center, and two private companies, EID and Mecanova.
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