Abstract
Quality evaluation of red ginsengs is determined by outer shape and inner qualities. Especially, the inner qualities are main grading criteria. Currently, red ginsengs are classified into 3-grades; heaven, earth and good. The best heaven grade must not include inner holes and sponge tissues. This study was conducted to develop a red ginseng sorting system using x-ray image processing technique. Because of lens characteristic, gray values of the central region in the x-ray image are higher and gradually decreased towards the edge regions. This difference of gray values gives trouble in segmentation and detection of inner holes in red ginseng image, so preprocessing technique is necessary. The preprocessing was done by subtracting source image from an empty background image. But, simple subtraction was not quite appropriate because of too small contrast between inner holes and sound part. Scaled subtraction images were obtained by multiplying all gray values by some numbers. However this method could not help to set threshold value because the gray values of root part are generally lower than body part when red ginseng is exposed to the x-ray. To determine threshold value for detecting inner holes, an algorithm was developed by increasing overall gray values of less clear images.
