ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates the requirements for designing a device-mediated carrot quality assessment and grading system and develops machinery that can effectively meet these requirements and test its effectiveness on actual production data. It discusses all design aspects including electronic hardware, software, lighting, mechanism and control. Pneumatic control and time-delay techniques were applied to control the whole process of carrot grading. The computer vision grading technology is real-time, objective, nondestructive, and can detect multiple indices simultaneously, such as size, defect, color, shape and maturity. Several carrot sorting systems are offered by some companies, such as TOMRA, Raytec Vision and Visar. But most commercial sorting systems were all-in-one machine and mainly focused on some common defects such as rots or color defects. So, developing special mechanical machinery using computer vision is necessary to improve the performance of carrot grading systems and increase the profits from carrot business.
