The application of a fast algorithm for the classification of olives by machine vision

Processed olives have traditionally been classified by human experts but the process is slow, expensive and without a good repeatability. The main objective of this paper is to design a system to sort olives automatically using machine vision. First of all, human experts classified different batches of olives in four categories to extract the parameters related with each class. After characterising the processed olives, an algorithm to sort automatically olives was implemented and tested. Different resolutions were considered to study the effect of resolution in the classification results. Finally, a comparison between human and machine results is done. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.