Abstract
A machine vision system was built to obtain single stationary image from an egg. This system includes a CCD camera, an image processing board and a lighting system. A computer program was written to acquire, enhance and get histogram from an image. To minimize the evaluation time, the artificial neural network with the histogram of the image was used for eggshell evaluation. Various artificial neural networks with different parameters were trained and tested. The best network(64-50-1 and 128-10-1) showed an accuracy of 87.5% in evaluating eggshell. The comparison test for the elapsed processing time per an egg spent by this method(image processing and artificial neural network) and by the processing time per an egg spent by this method(image processing and artificial neural network) and by the previous method(image processing only) revealed that it was reduced to about a half(5.5s from 10.6s) in case of cracked eggs and was reduced to about one-fifth(5.5s from 21.1s) in case of normal eggs. This indicates that a fast eggshell evaluation system can be developed by using machine vision and artificial neural network.
