A Novel Vision Sensing System for Tomato Quality Detection

Producing tomato is a daunting task as the crop of tomato is exposed to attacks from various microorganisms. The symptoms of the attacks are usually changed in color, bacterial spots, special kind of specks, and sunken areas with concentric rings having different colors on the tomato outer surface. This paper addresses a vision sensing based system for tomato quality inspection. A novel approach has been developed for tomato fruit detection and disease detection. Developed system consists of USB based camera module having 12.0 megapixel interfaced with ARM-9 processor. Zigbee module has been interfaced with developed system for wireless transmission from host system to PC based server for further processing. Algorithm development consists of three major steps, preprocessing steps like noise rejection, segmentation and scaling, classification and recognition, and automatic disease detection and classification. Tomato samples have been collected from local market and data acquisition has been performed for data base preparation and various processing steps. Developed system can detect as well as classify the various diseases in tomato samples. Various pattern recognition and soft computing techniques have been implemented for data analysis as well as different parameters prediction like shelf life of the tomato, quality index based on disease detection and classification, freshness detection, maturity index detection, and different suggestions for detected diseases. Results are validated with aroma sensing technique using commercial Alpha Mos 3000 system. Accuracy has been calculated from extracted results, which is around 92%. 1. Introduction The increased awareness and sophistication of consumers have created the expectation for improved quality in consumer food products. This has increased the need of advance quality monitoring systems for quality detection and early warning for different type food samples. Quality itself is defined as the sum of all those attributes which can lead to the production of products acceptable to the consumer when they are combined. The basic quality assessment is often subjective with large number of attributes such as appearance, smell, texture, and flavor, frequently examined by the consumers [1]. Tomato is one of the most consuming fruit samples after potatoes. Tomato is also easily available and cheap fruit for analysis purpose. Tomato is also included in the very major horticulture commodities [2]. Sometimes its demand increases at very high level in market due to low production or damage due to different disease