Abstract
Red ginsengs are inspected manually by examining those in the dark room with back light illumination. Manual inspection is often influenced by physical condition of inspectors. Sometimes. the best grade, heaven. has some inner holes though it was inspected by a specialist. In order to resolve this problem, this study was performed to develop image processing algorithm to detect the inner holes in the x-ray image of ginseng. Because of little gray value difference between background and ginseng in the image. simple thresholding method was not appropriate. Modified watershed algorithm was used to differentiate the inner holes from background and normal ginseng body. Inner hole edge region detected by watershed algorithm consists of many number of blobs including normal portions. With line profile analysis with scanning one line at a time beginning the starting point. it shelved two peaks both ends representing extracting each blobs. in which setting threshold value as of lower peak value enabled us to obtain inner hole image. Once this procedure has to be done till the finishing point it is completing inner hole detection for one blob. Thus. conducting ail blobs by this procedure is completing inner detection of one whole ginseng. Detection results of the inner holes fer various size of red ginsengs were good even though there was small detection variation. 6.2%. according to position of x-rat tube.