Lumiled's Lighting's Luxon and Cognex's PatFlex are components of a machine vision system developed at Georgia Tech Research Institute that is expected to be able to pinpoint foreign objects in finished poultry and other food products on the processing line. When contamination occurs, the manufacturer has to warehouse the food and determine if it should be reprocessed or scrapped. Plastic from processing machinery is usually detectable in a visual inspection done by a human being, but food producers want to be able to keep humans away during final processing stages to reduce the possibly of bacterial contamination. The color difference allows machine vision to detect the plastic, which is usually blue or another easily detected color. The researchers prototype includes a Sony CCD (charge-coupled device) color camera with 640x480-pixel resolution that can run at 30 frames per second. A computer algorithm processes the images and classifies each pixel as containing chicken, the conveyor belt, or a foreign object. Because lighting is very important in some machine vision applications, they chose a bank of white Luxon LEDs. The lights are turned on for 1.2ms in every frame, which reduced the duty cycle to 3.6% and reduced power consumption and heat generated. Testing demonstrated a detection rate of 100% for pieces of glove 1.5mm in size and 70% for colored pieces of tubing sized at 1mm. Among topics covered are label verification with ProofRead from Cognex and vision sensors from Banner Engineering that have more resolution and use CMOS-based imagers.