Author
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Chen, Yud |
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Submitted to: International Conference for Engineering and Technology Sciences
Publication Type: Proceedings Publication Acceptance Date: 10/11/2000 Publication Date: 10/11/2000 Citation: N/A Interpretive Summary: The agricultural industry, which includes growers, processors, distributors, and retailers, are concerned about providing cheap - yet quality and safe - foods to consumers and end-users. Applications of machine vision technology will improve the industry's productivity, thereby, reducing the cost. It will make agricultural operations and processing safer for farmers and processing-line workers. It will also help to provide better quality and safe foods to the consumers. With recent advances in electronics and computer and image acquisition technologies, machine vision systems have been applied to production, processing, and quality and safety control of foods and agricultural products. In this paper, current status of research and development of color and multispectral and hyperspectral imaging systems for modern food engineering was given. Examples of real-time, on-line systems for quality and safety inspections of foods and agricultural products were presented. Future trends of the technology applications are discussed. This information is valuable to the engineers who are interested in the applications of machine vision technology to agriculture, and to those who are interested in gaining knowledge of the current advances in machine vision applications in agriculture. Technical Abstract: With recent advances in electronics, computer, and image acquisition technologies, machine vision systems have been applied to production, processing, and quality and safety control of foods and agricultural products. However, because of the broad variety and non-uniformity in agricultural materials (both in composition and in morphology) within a lot or batch of agricultural products to be processed, applications of machine vision technology have traditionally been limited to color and monochromatic inspection and sorting. In order to fully apply the machine vision technology, the machine vision systems for agricultural applications should take full advantage of the fact that foods and agricultural products are biological materials; therefore, the differences in the characteristics of light absorption of the agricultural materials are very important. As a result, the current trends of machine vision systems development emphasized dnot only color, but also multispectral, and hyperspectral imaging techniques. In this paper, current applications of machine vision in agriculture are reviewed. The current status of research and development of multispectral and hyperspectral imaging systems for modern food engineering are discussed. Future trends of technology applications are discussed. |
