Bingo Girls of the UK
High Speed Bingo Ticket Printing in Sweden
A pair of Vision systems are in use to supervise the printing out of bingo lottery tickets in Sweden. The tickets are made at the Idrottens Digital Print AB (IDP) in Molnlycke.
Each ticket has 225 numbers printed on it and an individual number that acts like a barcode that makes the ticket unique from each other. The numbers, including the barcodes are printed using two inkjet printers. Printing the numbers uses variable data at a speed of 25 lottery tickets per second or 300 meters per minute to be exact. An additional Four JAI cameras, model M10 are used to carefully inspect the printing in each ticket and assigned to each printer. The two cameras can read about 1000 characters per second. One camera checks the lottery itself and the other is tasked to inspect the numbers and the barcodes.
The two work independently from each other although they are synchronized to work in unison, which will enable them to properly check the correct digits are printed on each ticket. Only a lone combination of numbers in each ticket corresponds to the five-digt lottery number. The numbers from a complex graphical object, which is recognized and transformed into characters by a special software using state-of-the art optical character recognition.
The whole system is PrintVision, which was developed by Soft Designs RTS AB from Gothenburg with a pattern recognition system, Minos,from Stemmer Imaging's software library Common Vision Blox. The system checks that the bingo numbers are correctly printed in each square, the bingo numbers for each lottery ticket corresponds to the individual lottery number. The lottery number is increased with one for each succeeding ticket. Also, the serial numner does not change during the actual printing. Misprints or errors are immediately detected and shown as a still image in the monitor. A red light will inform the operator that an error has happened and is active until the error is fixed.
It also creates a log for each error that occurred. The system also includes four PCI frame grabbers from DALSA. In addition, the system creates a log for each fault that occurs. The vision system also includes four PCI frame grabbers from DALSA.
