POSITION RECOGNITION AND QUALITY EVALUATION OF TOBACCO LEAVES VIA COLOR COMPUTER VISION

The position of tobacco leaves is affluence to the quality. To evaluate its quality, sample leaves was collected according to the position of attachment. In Korea, the position was divided into four classes such as high, middle, low and inside positioned leaves. Until now, the grade of standard sample was determined by human expert from korea ginseng and tobacco company. Many research were done by the chemical and spectrum analysis using NIR and computer vision. The grade of tobacco leaves mainly classified into 5 grades according to the attached position and its chemical composition. In high and low positioned leaves shows a low level grade under grade 3. Generally, inside and medium positioned leaf has a high level grade. This is the basic research to develop a real time tobacco leaves grading system combined with portable NIR spectrum analysis system. However, this research just deals with position recognition and grading using the color machine vision. The RGB color information was converted to HSI image format and the sample was all investigated using the bundle of tobacco leaves. Quality grade and position recognition was performed through well known general error back propagation neural network. Finally, the relationship about attached leaf position and its grade was analyzed.