Development of Oval-shaped Agricultural Product Inspection and Sorting System with Simultaneous Six-angle Photograph Taking and Its Practice

In the agricultural market, uniform appearance quality of products is becoming more important. In this paper, we propose a total surface inspection and sorting system of an oval-shaped agricultural product for the fully automated ranking operation under the uniform criteria. The system consists of a conveyance part, an image acquisition part, and a classification part. The conveyance part uses a sensor-driven independent driving system, which is constructed by three sets of the “V shape” arranged belt conveyors. In the image acquisition part, photographs of the object are taken from six different angles simultaneously. The classification part identifies the size, shape, and damage existence of the object. The experiment is performed using red peppers as an example of the oval-shaped agricultural product. This experiment is to confirm the effectiveness of conveyance and classification performance of the system and to make possible latent problems tangible. Furthermore, we newly adopt a sequence photographs camera for high-speed acquisition of the image. So we design a prototype of the industrial use with knowledge of the proposed system. We also refer to its feasibility of the practical use