67 Automated sorting of tree nuts.

T. PEARSON.

A background discussion of advantages and challenges involving the use of machine vision to perform high speed inspections for food quality are presented. This is followed by a review of real time machine vision applications for quality inspections of almonds and pistachio nuts. These applications include inspecting pistachio nuts for various shell defects as well as shell split characteristics. The application for almonds includes inspection of whole kernels for embedded shell fragments using transmitted light. All of these applications have an inspection throughput of 40 nuts per second, have a sorting accuracy of 90% or higher, and are cost competitive with current state of the art equipment that perform similar sorting operations but at a lower classification accuracy.