DEVELOPMENT OF AN INTEGRATED GRADER FOR APPLES

An integrated grader which measures soluble solid content, color and weight of fresh apples was developed by NAMRI. The prototype grader consists of the near infrared spectroscopy and machine vision system. Image processing system and an algorithm to evaluate color were developed to speed up the color evaluation of apples. To avoid the light glare and specular reflection, an half-spherical illumination chamber was designed and fabricated to detect the color images of spherical-shaped apples more precisely. A color revision model based on neural network was developed. Near-infrared(NIR) spectroscopy system using NIR reflectance method developed by Lee et al(1998) of NAMRI was used to evaluate soluble solid content. In order to observe the performance of the grader, tests were conducted on conditions that there are 3 classes in weight sorting, 4 classes in combination of color and soluble solid content, and thus 12 classes in combined sorting. The average accuracy in weight, color and soluble solid content is more than about 90 % with the capacity of 3 fruits per second.