Smartphone-Based Imaging System and Method for Particle Size and Shape Measuring in Baijiu Brewing Process

Digital particle sizing is desirable in liquor brewing industry. This paper presents the design of a prototype imaging system for on-site particle size and shape measurement by utilizing the easily accessible smartphones. With a portable sampling box as auxiliary device, smartphones can take photographs at stable scale. A server is used to process images and establish a database to store the data for further statistical analysis. To facilitate the operation of workers, an APP is designed to communicate with the server and display the results. A sequence of image processing methods to segment particles and analyze the size distribution is introduced in some detail. Experiments performed on several different materials have demonstrated that the algorithm has strong adaptability with manually set upper and lower limits of the pixel area. The uncertainty of vision-based measurement is also discussed in brief.