Our long and wide experience of leather applications, from shoes to leathergoods, from automotive to furniture, shows that the starting point to gain efficiency in leather cutting is a good material assessment.
Many organizations put this delicate operation into the hands of the most skilled employees, who embody the tradition, the culture and the knowledge of their company.
Knowing where on a skin a piece can be placed and cut and especially where it cannot, sometimes looks more an art than a science.
That's why we made a software program that supports rather than substitute who is the real owner of that knowledge.
LeatherScan does not promise to automatically identify the quality areas, the stretching directions, the surface defects or the hidden scars: it just helps the users translate their knowledge into digital data that our nesting strategies can effectively use.
LeatherScan analyses hi-res pictures taken by off-the-shelf cameras, identifies marks on the leather and saves digital hides for later use.
Marks can be of different kinds:
- Ropes: segments of small-diameter ropes can be placed directly on the leather when it lies on the acquisition table. When delimiting a closed area, exceeding parts are ignored by the software.
Different quality levels are identified by dashes (shorter ropes) on the contour or circular patches inside the quality zones.
- Coloured chalk or crayons: the inspector can directly grade the hides by using very well contrasted lines of different colours. The colours carry the information about the quality level.
- White chalk or silver pen: an intermediate solution is the use of monocolour lines, which can be placed outside the acquisition area. Dashes or internal marks must be used to define the quality levels.
LeatherScan is normally linked to Job Manager to store hide batches into the database for the automatic or manual nesting.
Take a look at this video to see how the Pattern Vectoriser extracts some furniture shapes from an image taken by a camera.