The task of fruit sorting and fruit grading in general involves a number of challenges: fruits (and dates among them) are subject to high variation in color and texture, depending on variety, ripeness, and other conditions. Computer vision is a fast, economic, dependable and objective inspection and classification technique: it is financially convenient today for most crops. An automatic fruit recognition system which is able to identify with high speed and accuracy all meaningful product features such as size, weight, defect, quality, color, texture, ripeness and others brings immediate advantages to its users.Date sorting machines provide key benefits, ranging from fast and high-volume classification, savings in labor, consistent quality and reduced time-to-market. Ensuring proper fruits classification and quality is a crucial task for the producer in view of preparing the agricultural produce, whether it is marketed locally or destined to the export.
The dates sorting machine process which we have developed is indeed very fast: output can reach tens of thousands of pieces sorted per hour, an order of magnitude which human sorting cannot even approach. The accuracy level of the automatic date sorting process is much higher too, providing for a very reliable solution to minimize the time needed to bring product to the markets.
Automatic fruits classification
The method implemented by RSIP Vision extracts visual cues and features from the date. Several variables are taken into account. Length, shape, softness, intensity and weight are all (among others) eligible variables which provide precious information to the computer vision system. Our method then feeds this information to a machine learning scheme for automatic classification of dates. After proper training, performed by comparing data to a manual classifier – appropriately selected as the ground truth – the system provides an excellent automatized fruits classification.
The benefits of this method for automatic fruit classification are not only economic: our computer vision solution for date sorting are also hygienic and guarantee an objective assessment when market standards need to be met. Following our experience with dates sorting, we can only recommend further adoption of image processing and image analysis technologies in all kinds of fruit sorting. Contact our experts and they will be happy to advise you on your project.
