Quality inspection of food and agricultural products
18 Feb 2022 | Reading time: 3 min
DISCOLOURATION
Although this can sometimes signify that the produce is not ripe, it is also used as part of a grading process created for supermarkets. High-end supermarkets will favour perfect produce with target colour ranges / shades, and they are willing to pay more for it. So it’s in the farmers interest to ensure that it is graded accordingly and quickly.
Line scan colour cameras can help to automatically detect the produces’ colour and sort it at very high speeds – find out more about how they work.
Size
Supermarkets set criteria for the size of the crops they require and farmers will want to ensure they have the biggest yield - reducing waste by only harvesting at the right times. Locating the position and size of the produce - while it’s in the field - can automate this process by generating data to help identify what should be picked (and when).
The location of each fruit or vegetable that meets the criteria can be passed onto an automated robotic picking system – reducing the need for manual harvesting. Any produce that isn’t picked is correlated with weather forecasts to help predict when the next optimum harvesting time would be.
The LMI Gocator is perfect for 3D scanning the crops, its IP 67 rating also makes it ideal for the outdoor conditions.
Here’s a great example on it being used to help automated broccoli harvesting.
All produce is naturally going to have some variation to its shape and the vision system will need to take this into account with its grading process.
Misshapes
The shape of produce is also used in the grading system used to find the “perfect” fruit & vegetables. So separating these from any odd-looking fruit and veg is also of interest to the farmers.
Unfortunately defects are not always visible on the surface of the produce and techniques to be able to see beneath it need to be employed.
Recent advances in machine vision technology have introduced the ability to be able to see beyond the surface of fruit and vegetables to detect the “hidden” bruising, mould, disease, and pests that can not be detected manually or by colour machine vision systems. These systems can even detect how ripe a fruit is, which is especially useful for fruits that do not change colour when they are ripe (eg avocados).
Hyperspectral imaging enables molecular level inspection of organic products, bringing the advantages of spectroscopy into the machine vision arena.
Artifical intelligence on the farm
In modern agriculture, machine vision is not only used in automation and robotics applications, but also for inspecting seeds and crops. MVTec's powerful deep-learning-based machine vision software HALCON is perfect for driving productivity, efficiency and sustainability in agriculture.
Want to learn more? Visit our webinar:
- Machine Vision - Key for Agriculture 4.0 (together with our partner MVTec) | 09.03.2022