• 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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• 2000.11c
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• pp.513-520
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• 2000

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.

• Journal of Biosystems Engineering
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• v.24 no.1
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• pp.67-74
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• 1999

A prototype cut-flower sorter was developed and tested for its performance with five varieties of roses. Support plates driven by a chain mechanism transported the roses into an image inspection chamber. Color image processing algorithms were developed to evaluate the length, thickness, and straightness of stem and color, height, and maturity of bud. The average absolute errors of the system for the measurements of stem length, stem thickness, and height of bud were 19.7 mm, 0.5 mm, and 3.8 mm, respectively. The results of classification by the sorter were compared with those of a human inspector for straightness of stem and maturity of bud. The classification error for the straightness of stem was 8.6%, when both direct image and reflected image by a mirror were analyzed. The accuracy in classifying the maturity of bud varied among the varieties, the smallest for‘Nobless’(1.5%) and the largest for‘Rote Rose’(13.5%). The time required to process a rose averaged 2.06 seconds, equivalent to the capacity of 1,600 roses per hour.

• Resources Recycling
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• v.20 no.1
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• pp.28-36
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• 2011

More than 50% of refractory materials generated from high-temperature melting furnace was not carbonized and could be recycled by adopting proper separation process. In the present work, the separation of refractory materials has studied by adopting color sorting technology to promote the recycling of waste refractory. Purity of the refractory materials was obtained with at 97.2%, color temperature of sorter light source 6,500K, which gives less interference of surrounding light source. Purity and separation efficiency were improved as size is setting bigger and lower conveyer belt speed. It is revealed that optimum conditions were color temperature 6,500K, conveyer belt speed 1,000 mm/sec, particle size -20 mm, etc. To improve purity and separation efficiency on below 10mm size, the resolution of should be fixed camera and it narrow recognition range. As a result of the study, color sorting technology could be used for separation of waste refractory materials and will contribute to promote the waste recycling.

• 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.

• The Korean Journal of Applied Statistics
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• v.16 no.1
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• pp.129-140
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• 2003

This study was to develop a fruit sorting system using statistical image processing. Histogram was used to compare fruit colors to standard fruit color and edge detector using Wilcoxon test was used to calculate an accurate geometrical characteristics of fruit including perimeter, area, major axis and minor axis length and roundness. The experimental result obtained from using our system for sorting apples was presented.

• Journal of the Institute of Convergence Signal Processing
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• v.21 no.4
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• pp.154-161
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• 2020

This paper presented the basics of using a sorting system to reduce human effort and increase accuracy. The proposed system has consisted of a camera, motors, and a Raspberry Pi. This system can classify the apples as immature, mature, ripe condtion, and etc. In this experiment, 100 apples were randomly selected by purchasing various apples from a local market. The accuracy percentage was 95% and processing time was about 8 seconds per each apple. The proposed system could be useful to reduce labor.

• Agricultural and Biosystems Engineering
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• v.1 no.2
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• pp.106-110
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• 2000

An integrated on-line inspection system was constructed with seven cameras, half mirrors to split images. 720 nm and 970 nm band pass filters, illumination chamber having several tungsten-halogen lamps, one main computer, one color frame grabber, two 4-channel multiplexors, and flat plate conveyer, etc. A total of seven images, that is, one color image form the top of an apple and two B/W images from each side (top, right and left) could be captured and displayed on a computer monitor through the multiplexor. One of the two B/W images captured from each side is 720nm filtered image and the other is 970 nm. With this system an on-line grading software was developed to evaluate appearance quality. On-line test results with Fuji apples that were manually fed on the conveyer showed that grading accuracies of the color, defect and shape were 95.3%, 86% and 88.6%, respectively. Grading time was 0.35 second per apple on an average. Therefore, this on-line grading system could be used for inspection of the final products produced from an apple sorting system.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society for Agricultural Machinery Conference
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• 2000.11c
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• pp.551-559
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• 2000

An integrated on-line inspection system was constructed with seven cameras, half mirrors to split images, 720 nm and 970 nm band pass filters, illumination chamber having several tungsten-halogen lamps, one main computer, one color frame grabber, two 4-channel multiplexors, and flat plate conveyer, etc., so that a total of seven images, that is, one color image from the top side of an apple and two B/W images from each side (top, right and left) could be captured and displayed on a computer monitor through the multiplexor. One of the two B/W images captured from each side is 720nm filter image and the other is 970nm. With this system an on-line grading software was developed to evaluate appearance quality. On-line test results to the Fuji apples that were manually fed on the conveyer showed that grading accuracies of the color, defective and shape were 95.3%, 86% and 91%, respectively. Grading time was 0.35 sec per apple on an average. Therefore, this on-line grading system could be used for inspection of the final products produced from an apple sorting system.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information and Communication Engineering
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• v.21 no.9
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• pp.1681-1688
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• 2017

In this paper, we implemented a high-speed signal processing hardware system for Color Line Scan Camera using FPGA and Nor-Flash. The existing hardware system mainly processed by high-speed DSP based on software and it was a method of detecting defects mainly by RGB individual logic, however we suggested defect detection hardware using RGB-HSL hardware converter, FIFO, HSL Full-Color Defect Decoder and Image Frame Buffer. The defect detection hardware is composed of hardware look-up table in converting RGB to HSL and 4K HSL Full-Color Defect Decoder with high resolution. In addition, we included an image frame for comprehensive image processing based on two dimensional image by line data accumulation instead of local image processing based on line data. As a result, we can apply the implemented system to the grain sorting machine for the sorting of peanuts effectively.