• Journal of Biosystems Engineering
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• v.18 no.4
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• pp.358-370
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• 1993

In Korea, fruit grading has been mainly done manually, and manual grading depends on human sense. Thus it is subjected to human error and is not always as consistent as would be desired. Therefore, a study on the development of fruit grader was initiated to improve the consistency of fruit grading. The sensitivity for fruit weight of the conventional spring type weight grader has a tendency to decrease by physical characteristics of spring which is used as a weight sensing unit. This study was carried out to develop weight measuring device for establishing the base of weight sensing unit of electronic weight grader. This device consists of a weight sensor using load cell, data acquisition system, and a microcomputer containing program to calculate fruit weight. The weight measuring device using load cell was developed to increase sensitivity of fruit weight. The result of this study showed that the weight sensing unit of electronic weight grader contributed to the improvement of performance of weight measuring device.

• Journal of Biosystems Engineering
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• v.17 no.4
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• pp.363-369
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• 1992

The aim of this study was to examine the blurring effects on performance of the experimental fruit grader in grading Fuji apples by size and coloration of the whole surface of individual apples. The grader consisted of a black/white image prcessing system, one camera, and utilized the algorithm developed for high speed sorting in the previous study. The results are summarized as follows : 1. With the algorithm developed in the previous study, it took 0.27~0.33 second in analyzing the size and coloration of an apple, and relative errors were within 3% for size and 1.3% for coloration. 2. The effect of blurring increased linearly with the conveying speed of apple and showed more significant effect on detection of coloration than on determining of size. 3. Considering the blurring effect, capacity of the experimental fruit grader was estimated to 7,500 apples per hour.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society for Agricultural Machinery Conference
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• 1993.10a
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• pp.1292-1301
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• 1993

This study was intended to examine feasibility of sizing and color grading of Fuji apple with black/white image processing system , to develop a device with which the whole surface of an apple could be captured by one camera , to develop an algorithm for a high speed sorting , and to examine the effects of blurring on the performance of the experimental fruit grader.

• Journal of Practical Agriculture & Fisheries Research
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• v.8 no.1
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• pp.21-29
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• 2006

When apples are picked or selected by grader, the rate of wound occurrence on the skin by apple stalk is remarkably high if the apple was bigger than 3 size during the harvest time. Except this case, the other sizes showed very little similarity. The crop of apple per 1 minute was 2.9kg without cutting fruit stalk, whereas only 1.1kg of the apples were obtained due to cutting the fruit stalk. Thereby, the harvesting without cutting fruit stalk is highly effective in terms of productivity rather than cutting the fruit stalk. As far as the wound occurrence rate on apple skin by apple stalk of distance between grader's dish and accumulated board is concerned, the grader which has no distance showed quite low rate of wound occurrence compared with those grader with 3cm or 8cm distance. When the apple was being stored, there was no difference in firmness between the cut stalk apple and the uncut stalked apple, however there was slightly more weight loss in the cut stalk apple than uncut stalk apple.

• Journal of Biosystems Engineering
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• v.20 no.1
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• pp.95-103
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• 1995

A series of study has been conducted to develop a multi-purpose fruit grader using a black ＆ white image processing system equipped with a 550 nm interference filter. A device and high performance algorithms were developed for sizing and color grading of Fuji apple in the previous study. In this study an emphasis was put on finding correlations between weights of several kinds of fruits and their area fractions(AF), and on compensating the blurring effect upon sizing and color grading by conveying speed of fruit. Also, the effect of orientation and direction of fruit on conveyor during image forming was analyzed to identify any difficulty (or utilizing an automatic fruit feeder. The results are summarized as follows. 1. The correlation coefficients(r) between the weights of fruits and their image sizes were 0.984~0.996 for apples, 0.983~0.990 for peachs, 0.995 for tomato, 0.986 for sweet persimmon and 0.970~0.993 for pears. 2. It was possible to grade fruits by color with the area weighted mean gray values(AWMGV) based on the mean gray valves of direct image and the compensated values of reflected image of a fruit, and also possible to sort fruits by size with AF. Accuracies in sizing and color grading ranged over 81.0% ~95.0% and 82.0% ~89.7% respectively as compared with results from sizing by electronic weight scale and grading by expert. 3. The blurring effect on the sizing and color grading depending on conveying speed was identified and regression equations were derived. 4. It was found that errors in sizing and coloring grading due to the change in direction and orientation of Fuji apple on the conveyor were not significant as far as the stem end of apple keeping upward.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society for Agricultural Machinery Conference
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• 2000.11c
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• pp.513-520
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• 2000

An integrated grader which measures soluble solid content, color and weight of fresh apples was developed by NAMRI. The prototype grader consists of the near infrared spectroscopy and machine vision system. Image processing system and an algorithm to evaluate color were developed to speed up the color evaluation of apples. To avoid the light glare and specular reflection, an half-spherical illumination chamber was designed and fabricated to detect the color images of spherical-shaped apples more precisely. A color revision model based on neural network was developed. Near-infrared(NIR) spectroscopy system using NIR reflectance method developed by Lee et al(1998) of NAMRI was used to evaluate soluble solid content. In order to observe the performance of the grader, tests were conducted on conditions that there are 3 classes in weight sorting, 4 classes in combination of color and soluble solid content, and thus 12 classes in combined sorting. The average accuracy in weight, color and soluble solid content is more than about 90 % with the capacity of 3 fruits per second.

• Journal of the Korea Society of Computer and Information
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• v.13 no.6
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• pp.155-162
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• 2008

The quality of the fruits is measured by a lot of parameters. The grader of the fruits to measure the size of them is using the rotation drum method. Therefore when we classify the size of the fruits, they will be damaged. Also the optical grader used for estimating the degree of the saccharinity will incur high cost for it. In the proposed system, to select the characteristics of the fruits, three cameras are used. Because the information such as the volume and the degree of the maturity is used to classify the fruits, the degree of the saccharinity can't be estimated itself, but the information such as the color and the damage of the fruits can be estimated. Therefore, because we don't need the digital image with high resolution, we can develop the grader system of the fruit with low cost. To evaluate the performance of the proposed system, we compared it with the sight estimation and then we classified the sample. The result shows the accuracy of 96.7%.

• Journal of Biosystems Engineering
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• v.24 no.3
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• pp.267-274
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• 1999

An internet and network based software and related interface have been developed, which can remotely control and manage an on-site operating system. Developed software modules were composed of two parts: monitoring/management modules and control/diagnosis modules were developed for the network status, warehouse, production and selling status. Modules of control with diagnosis were developed for the on-site operating system and interface. Each module was integrated and the whole modules have been tested with an automatic mushroom grading/sorting system which was built in a laboratory. Developed software modules worked successfully without any uncommon situations such as system down caused by the software or data transfer error. Each software module was developed independently in order to apply easily to other existing on-site systems such as rice processing centers, fruit and vegetable sorting, packaging and distribution centers scattered over the country.

• Journal of Biosystems Engineering
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• v.17 no.4
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• pp.354-362
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• 1992

This study was intended to examine feasibility of sizing and color grading of Fuji apple with black/white image processing system, to develop a device with which the whole surface of an apple could be captured by one camera, and to develop an algorithm for a high speed sorting. The results are summarized as follows : 1. The black/white image processing system used in this study showed a maximum error of 1.3% in area measurement with a reference figure while the focusing point of camera and location of the reference figure were changed within a certain range. 2. As the result of evaluating four automatic image segmentation algorithms with apple images, Histogram Clustering Method was the best in terms of computation time and accuracy. 3. The fast algorithm for analyzing size and coloration of apple was developed. 4. The whole surface of an apple could be captured in an image frame with two mirrors installed on the both sides of the sample. The total area of the image representing the whole surface showed a correlation of 0.995 with the weight of apple. 5. The gray level when a particular band pass filter was mounted on the camera showed high correlation with 'L' and 'a' values of Hunt color scale and could represent the coloration of apple.