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SCANNING THE CONTENTS
Olives tumble over one another, separated out into different streams by hue and shape. Multiscan Technologies was created more than a decade ago by university researchers from the Polytechnic University of Valencia, who realized that their artificial vision technology might be useful in the food sector, as a method for determining the quality of a particular product or of classifying and separating produce by colour. They focused on olives—a key Spanish product—collaborating with a local Spanish olive packaging company, La Española. The machines could determine which olives were ripe by their colour, and separate those for packaging.
“The first machines functioned quite well, and so La Española proposed that we create a company and commercialize the machines—even to their competitors,” says Álvaro Soler, Multiscan’s general manager.
At the time, the olive sorting machines on the market could only categorize types of olives roughly and moved quite slowly, about 2,000 kilos an hour. The new Multiscan machine could, through artificial vision technology, separate out the best olives with greater precision and at a speed 10 times as fast, at 20,000 kilos an hour.
Today’s machines can manage millions of olives an hour, as much as 30,000 kilos. That is in large part because of improvements in computer speed, together with the development of proprietary software that allows the machine to make decisions at lightning speed.
“So we’re no longer just classifying the olives by colour,” says Soler, “but now we’re also able to rapidly classify them … by their form, by visible defects, even utilizing technology to detect internal defects.” The machines’ artificial vision employs infrared and ultraviolet light, lasers, and x-ray technologies, to get the maximum amount of information about a particular product as it passes through.
But the knowledge the company had accrued—how to distinguish among very small objects at a speedy pace—was not applicable only to olives. “We realized that we’re actually specialists in managing small, round objects, so we entered the U.S. market by applying our technology to cherry tomatoes,” continues Soler. Today the company exports more than half of its machines to process cherry tomatoes, macadamia nuts in Hawaii, and other products throughout South America and Europe.
Multiscan is now focusing on improving x-ray technology for quality control, to scan inside, for instance, bottles of olives to detect whether perhaps a pit escaped notice, or a bottle is contaminated with a stray piece of plastic. With such advanced technology, and with their experience in rapid evaluation of information from various information inputs, in 2010 the company expanded its artificial vision product line from food into the realm of security, developing a machine to detect explosives in hand luggage. These machines are being sold by the Spanish multinational Indra.
“We’ve developed a high-resolution machine that can operate 10 to 100 times more rapidly than current technology, and costs 10 times less,” says Soler.
All these innovations in machinery for the food sector, says Victor Alves, director of the Spanish Association of Machinery for the Food Industry, which represents a number of different food industry associations, “help customers reduce their costs, and reduce their consumption of resources for a smaller impact on the environment… These companies design products that increase the value of food products” around the world.
S20F System from Multiscan Technologies for selection of elaborated olives by quality. Photo: Multuscan Technologies
Extract from an article published in the magazine Technology Review
www.technologyreview.com/spain/food
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