Colour identification and quality inspection system for agricultural produce

A system has been developed in which color detection is one aspect of an overall quality inspection process. In a typical application, the system can sort and route tomatoes to five output grades according to their ripeness and size. A CCD color television camera inspects the produce passing on a conveyor or rotating rollers. Color quality in an early prototype was determined by matrixing and digitization followed by a two-dimensional lookup table process. The two-dimensional lookup table has now been replaced by a three-dimensional lookup table which can be used to define 262132 or 2¹⁸ unique colors