Techniques of Analysing the Colour of Produces for Automatic Classification

In the classification of fruits and vegetables, colour is one of the most important parameter that allows for the evaluation of their degree of maturity and freshness, and existence of faults. Also, colour along with its level of homogeneity influences the degree of acceptance of consumers, as well as the pricing. Qualitative sorting is usually performed by trained inspectors. This type of evaluation is rather expensive and is determined by operators' inconsistency and subjectivity. Machine vision technology offers objective solutions for all these problems and it is considered to be a promise for replacing the traditional human inspection methods. This paper introduces and discusses several techniques of analysing the colour of produces, based on image processing. An automatic video-inspection system was conceived, designed and realised, and it was employed for testing these techniques. The details regarding its design and the conclusions resulted from these experiments are presented here, as well.