Vision systems for the meat industry
e+v Technology is supplying vision systems for the meat industry since almost 30 years.
This includes grading and classification systems for beef, pork, lamb and poultry as well as automation solutions and robotics.
The majority of the business is beef carcass grading.
There are two different e+v beef grading camera systems the VB2000 and the VBG2000.
The VBS2000 is a full carcass side vision system installed at the end of the slaughter line to measure carcass conformation and fat class and also for primal weights and saleable meat predictions. The system has been approved in several countries and is widely used especially in Europe for official beef carcass classification based on the EUROP classification system and for payment to the producers.
The VBG2000 is a beef rib eye vision system installed in the grading cooler. The system has been developed by and with scientists of the US Meat Animal Research Center, the US meat industry and e+v. The system outputs the marbling, rib eye area, fat thickness, yield grade and meat and fat color. The system has been approved in the US, Canada and Australia and is used in other countries like Mexico and Russia as well. Approximately 95% of the North American fed cattle are graded with this system today. Over the last 15 years hundreds of million cattle have been analyzed with the VBG2000.
Based on industry demands, the system continuously gets further developed and upgraded to new versions. E.g., a first method has been developed to grade Wagyu cattle.
The VBG 7L is a new upgrade of the approved instrument what projects 7 laser lines on the rib eye to measure potential ribbing and placement errors to ensure better data capture in day-to-day operation.
The VBG smart is a new cell phone camera vision system for smaller clients and customers without stationary grading stands and/or not enough space. The system captures the rib eye images and sends the images to an external device for image processing using the approved software algorithms for all grading elements.
The VBG robot is a development project in cooperation with the US beef industry for a full automated grading camera solution. A 3D vision system is measuring the location of the rib eye cut in the 3D space and the grading camera is automatically positioned using an industrial robot.