Abstract
Production of green pepper has increased for ten years in Korea, as customer's preference of a pepper tuned to fiesta one. This study was conducted to develop an on-line fading algorithm of green pepper using machine vision and aimed to develop the automatic on-line grading and sorting system. The machine vision system was composed of a professive scan R7B CCD camera, a frame grabber and sets of 3-wave fluorescent lamps. The length and curvature, which were main quality factors of a green pepper were measured while removing the stem region. The first derivative of the thickness profile was used to remove the stem area of the segmented image of the pepper. A new boundary was generated after the stem was removed and a baseline of a pepper which was used for the curvature determination was also generated. The developed algorithm showed that the accuracy of the size measurement was 86.6% and the accuracy of the bent was 91.9%. Processing time spent far grading was around 0.17 sec per pepper.
