In order to assign the production data of railway wheels to each wheel, they are provided with a sequence of numbers. The numbers are embossed on the side flank in a red-hot state. The production data must be read in the raw, slightly scaled state before further machining. The reading station must be designed to withstand the harsh environment with dripping coolant and falling scale. Since the production facilities are located in different countries, the operator guidance must be multilingual.

Due to the lack of contrast between writing and background, conventional 2D camera systems cannot be used. In these cases, the CV-600 system is used with a three-dimensional camera. The system works according to the triangulation principle with a line laser and captures a height profile at the location of the laser with each image acquisition. By moving the optical sensor with an axis of rotation, a height relief (3D image) of the wheel unfolding is created. Depending on the radius of the wheel, up to 40,000 images are recorded and evaluated for a complete unwinding. For this purpose, the character sequence is extracted from the 3D image with a special image pre-processing and then the important sequence of digits is determined and read with the integrated reading software. To adapt the system to the different wheel diameters, a linear axis is mounted on the rotary axis. Both drives for this are controlled via the simple user interface in addition to the parameters for machine vision.