7 tons per hour quality sorting of potatoes in an automated 24-hour operation
Samro AG manufactures and markets high-quality equipment for the processing of agricultural products. In order to keep ensuring their quality standards and a faster development time, our customer needed a solution for assessing potato quality mechanically, in an automated 24-hour operation - one of the trickiest stages in the potato sorting process. The system must be able to handle a potato throughput of 7 metric tons/hour (approx. 20 potatoes per second). In the process, any cracks and broken-off pieces, misshaped potatoes, diseased areas and colour abnormalities must be reliably detected.
In the course of a feasibility study, the SCS-Vision team developed a colour, shape and crack classifier. Next, a DSP platform was developed. The pre-processing of the 75 megapixels takes place in an FPGA, with the main processing running in a DSP with a computing power of 4.8 GIPS. The ejection mechanism is controlled by an industry standard interface.
The algorithms have already been verified in the quality-sorting field, and are now being used for quality sorting of organic materials. This opens up the possibility that, in the future, any material with fuzzy quality criteria can be automatically processed.
 Fact sheet (PDF, German)
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