Spatial-Frequency-Domain Imaging Instrument for Quality Assessment of Apples

Inspection, detection, and sorting are of great importance in the fruit industry. Manual inspection is expensive, slow, and prone to error and inconsistency. Because of the great potential benefits to the fruit industry, improved machine vision systems are needed in order to extend the quality control task to include detection of more subtle phenomena such as bruises and degree of ripeness. The proposed work will provide essential design information for post harvest apple quality evaluation using a novel optical technique. The design information will be used in a Phase II to build a dedicated prototype imaging inspection system for sorting apples based on surface and internal defects as well as positive attributes of quality.