Machine Vision Online Measurements

Abstract

With increased expectations for food products of high quality and safety standards, the need for accurate, fast, and objective quality determination of these characteristics in food products continues to grow. Machine vision systems are automated, nondestructive and cost-effective, and ideally suited for routine inspection and quality assurance tasks which are common in the food and agro-products industries. Machine vision is a technology that allows the automation of visual inspection and measurement tasks using digital cameras and image analysis techniques. Machine vision system generally consists of five basic components: light source, an image-capturing device, an image capture board (frame grabber), and the appropriate computer hardware and software. The potential of computer vision in the food industry has long been recognized and the food industry is now ranked among the top ten industries using this technology. Traditional visual quality inspection performed by human inspectors has the potential to be replaced by computer vision systems for many tasks. There is increasing evidence that machine vision is being adopted at commercial level. This chapter highlighted the construction and image processing of online detection by machine vision. First, an introduction to the image acquisition system, including lighting system, camera, and lens, was given. Then, the image processing, which includes imaging segmentation, interpretation, and classification, was discussed. At last, three examples of online food quality detection were introduced.