Wood Defect Detection using Grayscale Images and an Optimized Feature Set

In this paper we address the issue of detecting defects in wood using features extracted from grayscale images. The feature set proposed here is based on the concept of texture and it is computed from the co-occurrence matrices. The features provide measures of properties such as smoothness, coarseness, and regularity. Comparative experiments using a color image based feature set extracted from percentile histograms are carried to demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed feature set. Two different learning paradigms, neural networks and support vector machines, and a feature selection algorithm based on multi-objective genetic algorithms were considered in our experiments. The experimental results show that after feature selection, the grayscale image based feature set achieves very competitive performance for the problem of wood defect detection relative to the color image based features