The Desktop Grading Station (DGS) allows an assessment of the legibility of laser engraved QR-Codes on tires. While the grading feature available in the DGS and in the 4JET T-MARK laser engravers performs a grading procedure based on ISO/IEC 29158 and adapted to the special situation on tires, the additional so-called “Legibility-Grading” of the DGS evaluates the approximated overall legibility of said code under different lighting conditions. To achieve this, many different lighting conditions are simulated and graded. By analysing the code quality of those results, a value for the legibility of the code is deduced.

The system weight of only 16 kg and the size of 1250 mm x 845 mm x 250 mm allows for easy transportation. After the operator has loaded the tire and positioned the camera over the code using the flexible balancer arm, the semi-automatic grading process is started. After image acquisition and grading are finished, the results are immediately visualized on the user interface.

For statistical analysis, the acquired images and result data is saved, either to the local hard drive or a network storage.