Indentification and tracking of articles

摘要

Machine readable marks are applied to articles, particularly primal cuts of meat, preferably before removal from a carcass. They can thus be monitored during progress and data can be fed back to a central computer which may compute a value for the carcass. A preferred mark is a 3 x 3 matrix having two columns of coloured dots selected from colours representing 0,2,4,6 and 8; and a modifying column providing binary information indicating that 0 or 1 should be added to the values of adjacent coloured dots. <IMAGE>