• Proceedings of the Korean Society for Agricultural Machinery Conference
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• 1996.06c
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• pp.607-614
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• 1996

A computer vision based automatic intelligent sorting system for dried oak mushrooms has been developed. The developed system was composed of automatic devices for mushroom feeding and handling, two sets of computer vision system for grading , and computer with digital I/O board for PLC interface, and pneumatic actuators for the system control. Considering the efficiency of grading process and the real time on-line system implementation, grading was done sequentially at two consecutive independent stages using the captured image of either side. At the first stage, four grades of high quality categories were determined from the cap surface images and at the second stage 8 grades of medium and low quality categories were determined from the gill side images. The previously developed neuro-net based mushroom grading algorithm which allowed real time on-line processing was implemented and tested. Developed system revealed successful performance of sorting capability of approximate y 5, 000 mushrooms/hr per each line i.e. average 0.75 sec/mushroom with the grading accuracy of more than 88%.

• Journal of Biosystems Engineering
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• v.26 no.2
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• pp.147-154
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• 2001

In Korea and Japan, dried oak mushrooms are classified into 12 to 16 different categories based on its external visual quality. And grading used to be done manually by the human expert and is limited to the randomly sampled oak mushrooms. Visual features of dried oak mushrooms dominate its quality and are distributed over both sides of the gill and the cap. The 2nd prototype computer vision based automatic grading and sorting system for dried oak mushrooms was developed based on the 1st prototype. Sorting function was improved and overall system for grading was simplified to one stage grading instead of two stage grading by inspecting both front and back sides of mushrooms. Neuro-net based side(gill or cap) recognition algorithm of the fed mushroom was adopted. Grading was performed with both images of gill and cap using neural network. A real time simultaneous discharge algorithm, which is good for objects randomly fed individually and for multi-objects located along a series of discharge buckets, was developed and implemented to the controller and the performance was verified. Two hundreds samples chosen from 10 samples per 20 grade categories were used to verify the performance of each unit such as feeding, reversing, grading, and discharging unites. Test results showed that success rates of one-line feeding, reversing, grading, and discharging functions were 93%, 95%, 94%, and 99% respectively. The developed prototype revealed successful performance such as the approximate sorting capability of 3,600 mushrooms/hr per each line i.e. average 1sec/mushroom. Considering processing time of approximate 0.2 sec for grading, it was desired to reduce time to reverse a mushroom to acquire the reversed surface image.

• Journal of Biosystems Engineering
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• v.30 no.3 s.110
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• pp.172-178
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• 2005

Grading and sorting an indeterminate form of agricultural products such as sweet potatoes and potatoes are a labor intensive job because its shape and size are various and complicate. It costs a great deal to sort sweet potato in an indeterminate forms. There is a great need for an automatic grader fur the potatoes. Machine vision is the promising solution for this purpose. The optical indices for qualifying weight and appearance quality such as shape, color, defects, etc. were obtained and an on-line sorting system was developed. The results are summarized as follows. Sorting system combined with an on-line inspection device was composed of 5 sections, human inspection, feeding, illumination chamber, image processing & control, and grading & discharging. The algorithms to compute geometrical parameters related to the external guality were developed and implemented for sorting the deformed sweet potatoes. Grading accuracy by image processing was $96.4\%$ and the processing capacity was 10,800 pieces per hour.

• Journal of Biosystems Engineering
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• v.31 no.6 s.119
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• pp.514-523
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• 2006

Production of green pepper has been increased due to customer's preference and a projected ten-year boom in the industry in Korea. This study was carried out to develop an automatic grading and sorting system for green pepper using machine vision. The system consisted of a feeding mechanism, segregation section, an image inspection chamber, image processing section, system control section, grading section, and discharging section. Green peppers were separated and transported using a bowl feeder with a vibrator and a belt conveyor, respectively. Images were taken using color CCD cameras and a color frame grabber. An on-line grading algorithm was developed using Visual C/C++. The green peppers could be graded into four classes by activating air nozzles located at the discharging section. Length and curvature of each green pepper were measured while removing a stem of it. The first derivative of thickness profile was used to remove a stem area of segmented image of the pepper. While pepper is moving at 0.45 m/s, the accuracy of grading sorting for large, medium and small pepper are 86.0%, 81.3% and 90.6% respectively. Sorting performance was 121 kg/hour, and about five times better than manual sorting. The developed system was also economically feasible to grade and sort green peppers showing the cost about 40% lower than that of manual operations.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society for Agricultural Machinery Conference
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• 1993.10a
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• pp.1243-1253
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• 1993

Visual features of a mushroom(Lentinus Edodes L) are critical in sorting and grading as most agricultural products are. Because of its complex and various visual features, grading and sorting of mushrooms have been done manually by the human expert. Though actions involved in human grading looks simple, a decision making undereath the simple action comes form the results of the complex neural processing of the visual image. And processing details involved in the visual recognition of the human brain has not been fully investigated yet. Recently, however, an artificial neural network has drawn a great attention because of its functional capability as a partial substitute of the human brain. Since most agricultural products are not uniquely defined in its physical properties and do not have a well defined job structure, a research of the neuro-net based human like information processing toward the agricultural product and processing are widely open and promising. In this pape , neuro-net based grading and sorting system was developed for a mushroom . A computer vision system was utilized for extracting and quantifying the qualitative visual features of sampled mushrooms. The extracted visual features and their corresponding grades were used as input/output pairs for training the neural network and the trained results of the network were presented . The computer vision system used is composed of the IBM PC compatible 386DX, ITEX PFG frame grabber, B/W CCD camera , VGA color graphic monitor , and image output RGB monitor.

• Agricultural and Biosystems Engineering
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• v.4 no.1
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• pp.8-15
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• 2003

In Korea, quality evaluation of dried oak mushrooms are done first by classifying them into more than 10 different categories based on the state of opening of the cap, surface pattern, and colors. And mushrooms of each category are further classified into 3 or 4 groups based on its shape and size, resulting into total 30 to 40 different grades. Quality evaluation and sorting based on the external visual features are usually done manually. Since visual features of mushroom affecting quality grades are distributed over the entire surface of the mushroom, both front (cap) and back (stem and gill) surfaces should be inspected thoroughly. In fact, it is almost impossible for human to inspect every mushroom, especially when they are fed continuously via conveyor. In this paper, considering real time on-line system implementation, image processing algorithms utilizing artificial neural network have been developed for the quality grading of a mushroom. The neural network based image processing utilized the raw gray value image of fed mushrooms captured by the camera without any complex image processing such as feature enhancement and extraction to identify the feeding state and to grade the quality of a mushroom. Developed algorithms were implemented to the prototype on-line grading and sorting system. The prototype was developed to simplify the system requirement and the overall mechanism. The system was composed of automatic devices for mushroom feeding and handling, a set of computer vision system with lighting chamber, one chip microprocessor based controller, and pneumatic actuators. The proposed grading scheme was tested using the prototype. Network training for the feeding state recognition and grading was done using static images. 200 samples (20 grade levels and 10 per each grade) were used for training. 300 samples (20 grade levels and 15 per each grade) were used to validate the trained network. By changing orientation of each sample, 600 data sets were made for the test and the trained network showed around 91 % of the grading accuracy. Though image processing itself required approximately less than 0.3 second depending on a mushroom, because of the actuating device and control response, average 0.6 to 0.7 second was required for grading and sorting of a mushroom resulting into the processing capability of 5,000/hr to 6,000/hr.

• Journal of Biosystems Engineering
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• v.24 no.2
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• pp.153-158
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• 1999

As a basic research for the development of the automatic grading and sorting system for dried oak mushrooms, the device to acquire both cap and gill side images of mushroom has been developed and neural network based side recognition and quality grading has been proposed via inputting both side images. 20 quality grades have been selected considering the requirement of grade classifications imposed by the mushroom company. Developed DC motor driven‘V’type reversing device for the image acquisition of both side images of mushroom showed more than 95% success. Most error was caused by very small size mushrooms with a radius of around 1cm. However, it required a further research to reduce the reversing time. Grading and side recognition were performed via inputting normalized size factors and average gray levels of $8{\times}8$ grids converted from the raw images of both surfaces to the multi-layer back propagation(BP) network. Accuracy of the grading showed about 88.5% and the total grading time including reversing operation was around 2 seconds.

• Journal of Biosystems Engineering
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• v.19 no.2
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• pp.124-137
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• 1994

Visual features of a mushroom(Lentinus Edodes, L.) are critical in grading and sorting as most agricultural products are. Because of its complex and various visual features, grading and sorting of mushrooms have been done manually by the human expert. To realize the automatic handling and grading of mushrooms in real time, the computer vision system should be utilized and the efficient and robust processing of the camera captured visual information be provided. Since visual features of a mushroom are distributed over the front and back sides, recognizing sides and states of the stalk including the stalk orientation from the captured image is a prime process in the automatic task processing. In this paper, the efficient and robust recognition process identifying the front and back side and the state of the stalk was developed and its performance was compared with other recognition trials. First, recognition was tried based on the rule set up with some experimental heuristics using the quantitative features such as geometry and texture extracted from the segmented mushroom image. And the neural net based learning recognition was done without extracting quantitative features. For network inputs the segmented binary image obtained from the combined type automatic thresholding was tested first. And then the gray valued raw camera image was directly utilized. The state of the stalk seriously affects the measured size of the mushroom cap. When its effect is serious, the stalk should be excluded in mushroom cap sizing. In this paper, the stalk removal process followed by the boundary regeneration of the cap image was also presented. The neural net based gray valued raw image processing showed the successful results for our recognition task. The developed technology through this research may open the new way of the quality inspection and sorting especially for the agricultural products whose visual features are fuzzy and not uniquely defined.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Fisheries and Ocean Technology
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• v.56 no.1
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• pp.55-60
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• 2020

In this study, the authors introduce a newly developed flatfish grading system. Owing to the features of flatfish with and wide body, the general types of grading system are not easy to apply for it. Furthermore, the flatfish to be graded is alive such that the existing measurement and grading systems cannot be used for it as well. This study gives a solution for measuring and grading the flatfish with high speed and good accuracy. For this object, the authors developed flatfish measurement and grading system. This system consist of the feeding, conveying, measurement part and sorting part. Especially, the measurement part is made by vision based measuring technique which satisfies the given specification. The result from the experiment shows that the developed system is applicable for measuring and grading the flatfish sizes in variety.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society for Agricultural Machinery Conference
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• 1999.12a
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• pp.615-625
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• 1999