Artificial neural network classifier for quality inspection of nuts

In the food industry, automatic inspection of key ingredients as well as end products is gaining attention. Automatic detection of unhealthy ingredients on early stage of food production is becoming a vital task. In this paper, feature extraction of raw food ingredient's x-ray images and their classification is presented. X-ray images of pine and pistachio nuts are used as samples for this purpose. Statistical and texture features are extracted from each of original image samples as well as after applying edge detection on them. Texture features are calculated on global level and from co-occurrence matrices. Original features are used for classification independently, and in combination with edge features also. Artificial neural network is used as classifier. Texture features independently turned out better results with the classifier producing 0% and 6.8% false negative rate for pine and pistachio nuts respectively.