Automated optical inspection systems must fulfil high requirements of reliability, accuracy and speed. Due to its sustained research efforts, the High-Performance Image Processing business unit has succeeded in achieving a leading world-wide position in the area of optical quality control for security printing.

The multi-spectral examinations take place at a transportation speed of the prints from up to 10 m/sec (= 36 km/h) with a maximum accuracy of 100 pixels per square millimetre per spectral channel. In order to process the resulting data rates within the range of gigabytes per second, proprietary camera systems, new image processing algorithms and optimally coordinated computer hardware systems were developed. The focus of the research work is on the balance of hardware and software solutions.

More and more demanding requirements arising from new developments in the technology of security printing ask for new concepts with quality inspection systems involving image processing. Therefore we have accelerated the cycles for the development of new test systems with dedicated functionality, in which the various challenges in the combination of optics, lighting and mechanics need to be mastered.

The market requires from such inspection systems that they are user friendly and simple to configure. A goal of the research in this subject area is to reduce the complexity of the manual configuration of applications for image processing and to improve the quality of the results of optical quality control at the same time due to the optimized configuration. For that purpose we cooperate with the research institutions "Advanced Computer Vision" and "Software Competence Center Hagenberg".