More than a thousand years ago, since the birth of engravingand printing , printing technology has continued to grow and develop, and it is widely used in all walks of life. By 2020, according to the statistics of the China Business Industry Research Institute, the total output value of my country's printing industry will reach 1.32 trillion yuan. It predicts that the total output value of my country's printing industry will continue to increase in 2022, and is expected to reach 1.42 trillion yuan.
However, although our country is a big printing country, it is not yet a powerful printing country. In the "14th Five-Year Plan" of the printing industry, "intelligence" is listed as one of the four major development directions. To become a powerful printing country, it is necessary to develop and adopt intelligent printing equipment and testing equipment.
Detect graphic prints with "industrial eyes"
In the view of Xu Chongyou, the outstanding student representative of the first class of the Peking University Intelligence Seminar and the chairman of Chuangshi Intelligent Vision Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as "Chuangshi Intelligent"), "In the printing process, the printing equipment at the front end is advanced. The five recognized printing machine brands, Germany’s Heidelberg, Roland and KBA, and Japan’s Mitsubishi and Komori, are already very intelligent. But the development of back-end testing equipment is slow, and the production efficiency of the post-press process still needs to be improved.
Take the collating link as an example. Traditional collating requires manual work or a collating machine to match papers with different page numbers together in order. During the operation, there may be missing posts, multiple posts, or reversed front and back. to the position of the second sheet of paper. "Before the introduction of intelligent technology, only workers came to check the books at the finished product stage, and the wrong books may have been produced in large quantities." Batches of wrong books can only be scrapped, causing serious economic losses.
Xu Chongyou, who was born in the printing industry , found in many on-site investigations in printing factories , "How to solve these detection problems in the production process is also the most troubled problem reported by printing factory managers, and the introduction of visual inspection technology can solve this problem very well. question".
Xu Chongyou introduced that an industrial camera is installed on each station of the collating machine to collect the image of each book paper, and by comparing it with the standard image, it can be judged whether there are bad situations such as wrong stickers, missed stickers, and white pages. When a defective product is detected, the visual inspection system can output an alarm signal in time and even automatically reject it, which ensures the production yield, greatly improves the production efficiency of the printing factory, and reduces labor costs and economic losses caused by binding errors. At present, "Chuangshi Intelligent" applies visual inspection technology to printing processes such as folding, sewing, saddle stitching, and box gluing.
Aiming at the pain points that are difficult to solve in the industry, "Chuangshi Intelligent" continuously upgrades the visual inspection system. "For example, the paper used in some dictionaries or scriptures is very thin, and the characters on the back will see through to the front. If you use a system that has not been improved by technology to detect, the false positive rate of the machine is very high." "Chuangshi Smart" has been optimized through technology, It can realize the printing quality inspection of double-sided light-transmitting paper.
At present, the application of visual inspection technology in the printing industry is concentrated in post-press quality inspection. Except for special industries such as printing banknotes and tickets, the penetration rate of visual inspection technology in the printing industry is not high. Xu Chongyou believes that one of the reasons is that the old and new equipment in the actual printing scene is uneven, and it is difficult for a software system to adapt to all equipment.
"I have worked in the printing industry for 20 to 30 years. During this period, the mechanical equipment has been continuously updated, but the old equipment is still in use. We found that only the industrial vision system cannot solve the problem." According to the market situation, the software development was initially used as the The main "Chuangshi Smart" quickly changed its strategy, designed its supporting hardware mechanism in addition to software development, and added a standardized overall solution, "hoping that it can be applied to devices of different brands and models."
At present, the products of "Chuangshi Intelligent" have been widely used in book printing factories nationwide, such as the national Xinhua Printing System. According to Xu Chongyou, in the market segment of graphic books and periodicals, "Chuangshi Smart" has a market share of 70%. Founded in 2016, "Chuangshi Smart" was awarded the title of "Specialized, Specialized and New" SMEs in Shenzhen in 2021 five years after its establishment.
There is still a lot to be done for the intelligence of the printing industry
As he got deeper and deeper into the printing industry, Xu Chongyou found that the demand for higher detection technology in the printing industry was stronger than expected. For example, in the barcode and QR code scene on the packaging box, poor printing quality may affect the reading of the barcode scanner when the goods are sold, so every mark needs to be tested.
