Intelligent inspection and quality control of table olives

Abstract

Quality is a key factor of product-marketing in the field of agriculture and food industry. A number of researches have suggested the use of vision computer systems and machine learning (ML) techniques essentially to inspect imperfection surfaces and defects in fruit products. Following the trend, this paper still relies on the use of vision computer system by assuring an intelligent detection of table olive defect, with a certainty of its quality control. The specifically exploited computer vision system consists of automatically extracting the texture, colour, and shape features mainly from the global thresholding segmented image. With reference to the extracted features, the newly introduced system has the capacities of distinguishing between the defected and the healthy olive fruits rapidly and effectively at the same time. Subsequently, it is capable of identifying and specifying the diseased table olive. This system is also helpful for estimating the table olive size automatically. The experimental findings are indicative of the high accuracy of the binary classification algorithm, reaching 99, 32%, the average processing time for just one olive is about 0.4 s, which could meet the requirements of the real-time applications, and the error in estimating the size of the table olives does not exceed 10%.