Realization of a flexible platform for fruit inspection and classification applications with emphasis in rapid prototyping and development

In agriculture, industrial visual inspection systems are important for rapid classification during post-harvest handling, where many decisions have to be rapidly made in a fruit-by-fruit basis in terms of type and quality of the produce. Solutions have been proposed to classify many different types of fruits, but these solutions are highly specific to the applied problem so there is no room for knowledge and design reuse. Therefore, when targeting new classification problems, design costs can grow inordinately. The present paper proposes a solution based in reconfigurable hardware which can be rapidly reprogrammed in the context of an agile design flow that allows for modularization and standardized operation of basic image processing blocks.