Visual Bean Inspection Using a Neural Network

This paper describes a neural network based machine vision system designed for inspecting yellow beans in real time. The system consists of a camera. lights, a belt conveyor, air ejectors, and a computer. Beans are conveyed in four lines on a belt and their images are taken by a monochrome line scan camera when they fall down from the belt. Beans are separated easily from their background on images by back-lighting. After analyzing the image, a decision is made by a multilayer artificial neural network (ANN) trained by the error back-propagation (EBP) algorithm. We use the global mean, variance and local change of gray levels of a bean for the input nodes of the network. In an our experiment, the system designed could process about 520kg/hour.