An integral automation of industrial fruit and vegetable sorting by machine vision

Intensive fruit and vegetable sorting is a common task in productive regions. In order to meet the market standards, produce is classified according to quality levels that depend on maturity degree, weight, size, density, skin defects, etc. Probably the most important of these tasks involve automatic visual inspection. A distributed and scalable system for sorting automation is presented, that addresses all aspects of the quality classification mentioned above. The main characteristics of the system are: it can control from 1 to 10 conveyor belts; its maximum performance is 15 fruits per second per belt; apart from weight sensors, it combines infrared, color and ultraviolet images; some fruit defect modules are available to take account of the presence of a given defect.