The COOKIES (quality COntrOl of baKIng status of ovEn productS) Project is one of the 23 pilot projects of the EUTIST-IMV cluster. Eutist-IMV (Integrated Machine Vision) is a European Commision supported initiative to help European companies to innovate and improve their businesses by using machine vision technology. The Project is aimed to deign, prototype, test and validate a visual inspection and feedback control system of the several zones of an industrial oven for biscuits and baked products, in order to achieve a sensible improvement of product quality. It envolves a close collaboration beetwen Colussi Perugia, ATE (Applied Technical Engineering, Oy), for the visual inspection system, the Computing Engineering Department (DII) of University of Parma, for the control system design, and Satakunta Polytechnic (Finlad), with technical management and co-ordination roles.

The core of the Project is the implementation of a real-time oven control system. It will consist basically of a visual inspection system composed by colour-recognition specialised high-end cameras, coupled with the relative high performance image processing software, placed at the outlet of the oven. This system will be interfaced with a Fuzzy Logic closed loop control system that has to perform in real time the corrective actions necessary in case of wrong baking.

Thanks to this new system Colussi Perugia will be able to gain concrete benefits such as a sensible improvement of product quality steadiness, a reduction of food scraps and a sensible reduction of energy waste, due to better and faster gas burner control.

This Project strenghtens Colussi Perugia' s efforts in research activities, in which the Company has already been envolved for years.