Neuro-Net Based Automatic Sorting And Grading of A Mushroom (Lentinus Edodes L)

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.