Method and apparatus for the inspection of contained materials

#This invention relates to a method and apparatus for the inspection of contained materials such as liquids and the like, especially within containers.

#The invention in particular relates to objects comprising containers of contained materials which by their nature will be expected to have a single generally homogeneous composition, for example fluid compositions such as liquids, including mixtures, solutions, emulsions, suspensions etc, like flowable compositions such as gels, pastes, creams, fine powders, and the like, aerosols etc. Where reference is made herein by example to contained liquids in objects such as liquid containers it should be appreciated that the invention is equally applicable to all such liquid, partly-liquid and other flowable materials having this essential mixed and generally homogeneous character when contained.

#The invention particularly relates to an apparatus and method making use of high energy radiation such as x-rays or gamma-rays to scan objects where it is desirable to gain information about the internal contents and/or composition of the contained material.

#An example method of implementation of the invention is illustrated with reference to the accompanying drawings, in which:

#FIG. 1 is a representation of a bottle to be scanned in accordance with the principles of the invention;

#FIG. 2 is a schematic projection through a horizontal axis of the transmitted response;

#The invention is based on the principle of using high energy electromagnetic radiation such as x-rays γ-rays and to measure the transmittance properties of the object.

#While computed tomography scanners utilising X-rays in this way and are an advanced technology, they are dependent on making a large compliment of precision sequential measurements (scans) in order to render the volume of an object so that it can be viewed and then be interpreted. This inevitably involves a large hardware and computing overhead and is ultimately limited to the resolution of the system, its calibration, the artefacts that are inherent to the tomography method and any interpretation subsequently applied. Whilst pattern recognition methods have a role in the automated interpretation of images captured in such away, they have played no role in determining if the captured data fitted a representative picture of the test item. What is proposed here is that only sufficient data is captured to validate a description of an item, to a particular level of confidence, rather than to reconstruct a high quality image for human or machine aided inspection and then being of no further use. The concept is thus to provide a reductionist methodology to the verification process.

#The methodology project does by constructing the system response operator O which is a space and material derived operator that projects a vector δ on to different possible measurements of the scanning system response matrix λ, vector δ being defined as an appropriate set of stimuli elements related to parameters inherent in the target item that characterise the scanning response of the target item.