Neural Network Classifiers for Natural Food Products

Two cheap, off-the-shelf machine vision systems (MVS), each using an artificial neural network (ANN) as classifier, were developed, improved and evaluated to automate the classification of tomato ripeness and acceptability of eggs, respectively. Six thousand color images of human-graded tomatoes and 750 images of humangraded eggs were used to train, test, and validate several multi-layered ANNs. The ANNs output the corresponding grade of the produce by accepting as inputs the spectral patterns of the background-less image. In both MVS, the ANN with the highest validation rate was automatically chosen by a heuristic and its performance compared to that of the human graders’. Using the validation set, the MVS correctly graded 97.00% and 86.00% of the tomato and egg data, respectively. The human grader’s, however, were measured to perform at a daily average of 92.65% and 72.67% for tomato and egg grading, respectively. This results show that an ANN-based MVS is a potential alternative to manual grading.