Developments in computer vision system, focusing on its applications in quality inspection of fruits and vegetables-A review

Abstract

Quality inspection of food is a tedious and labor intensive process. Ever-increasing population, losses in handling and processing and the increased expectation of food products of high quality and safety standards has raised the need for accurate, fast and objective quality determination methods. Manual quality inspection is a slow, costly, unreliable process and suffers from poor repeatability. Computer vision provides one alternative for an automated, non-destructive and cost-effective technique to accomplish these requirements. Computer vision is a rapid, economic, consistent, objective inspection and evaluation technique. Computer vision has been successfully adopted for the quality analysis of meat and fish, fruits, vegetables and bread with applications ranging from routine inspection to the complex vision guided robotic control. The paper presents the recent developments in computer vision technology along with important aspects of image processing techniques coupled with application of computer vision technology in quality inspection of fruits and vegetables.