Non-destructive online seal integrity inspection utilizing autoencoder-based electrical capacitance tomography for product packaging assurance

Good quality packaging prevents contamination, secures preservation, and increases the ease of transportation in food and medical industries. One particular weakness of the package lies in the seal region where contents can be unintentionally incorporated, which disrupts the sealing process and compromises the structure and durability of the seal. To validate the seal quality effectively at high speed, a non-destructive high-resolution inspection approach combining enhanced sensors and reconstruction techniques is required. As the seal is flat and defects are minuscule, sensors have to be placed along the contour of the seal to achieve sufficient sensitivity. However, such conformal sensor placement poses new challenges to the ill-posed traditional tomography reconstruction. To overcome the limitation of sensing angle projections, imbalance in pixel representation and physical mea-surements, and asymmetric geometry of the sensed region, we propose a high-speed supervised autoencoder reconstruction approach. In this paper, our approach achieves high reconstruction image quality of irregular seal regions despite conformal sensor placement. While overcoming the limitations faced in traditional tomography, our model can be seamlessly integrated into the production line for real-time defect detection without affecting production speed and effectively minimizing manufacturing wastage and downtime.

Automated summary

Good quality packaging is crucial in ensuring food safety and preservation. However, the seal region of packages can be a weak point, leading to unintentional contamination and compromising the integrity of the seal. To address this issue, a non-destructive high-resolution inspection approach is proposed, using enhanced sensors and reconstruction techniques to effectively validate the seal quality. A supervised autoencoder reconstruction method is introduced to overcome the challenges posed by conformal sensor placement and achieve high-quality image reconstruction.