• Journal of Biosystems Engineering
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• v.26 no.2
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• pp.147-154
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• 2001

In Korea and Japan, dried oak mushrooms are classified into 12 to 16 different categories based on its external visual quality. And grading used to be done manually by the human expert and is limited to the randomly sampled oak mushrooms. Visual features of dried oak mushrooms dominate its quality and are distributed over both sides of the gill and the cap. The 2nd prototype computer vision based automatic grading and sorting system for dried oak mushrooms was developed based on the 1st prototype. Sorting function was improved and overall system for grading was simplified to one stage grading instead of two stage grading by inspecting both front and back sides of mushrooms. Neuro-net based side(gill or cap) recognition algorithm of the fed mushroom was adopted. Grading was performed with both images of gill and cap using neural network. A real time simultaneous discharge algorithm, which is good for objects randomly fed individually and for multi-objects located along a series of discharge buckets, was developed and implemented to the controller and the performance was verified. Two hundreds samples chosen from 10 samples per 20 grade categories were used to verify the performance of each unit such as feeding, reversing, grading, and discharging unites. Test results showed that success rates of one-line feeding, reversing, grading, and discharging functions were 93%, 95%, 94%, and 99% respectively. The developed prototype revealed successful performance such as the approximate sorting capability of 3,600 mushrooms/hr per each line i.e. average 1sec/mushroom. Considering processing time of approximate 0.2 sec for grading, it was desired to reduce time to reverse a mushroom to acquire the reversed surface image.