The application of a fast algorithm for the classification of olives by machine vision

Processed olives have traditionally been classified by human experts but th e process is slow, expensive and without a good repeatability. The main obj ective of this paper is to design a system to sort olives automatically usi ng machine vision. First of all, human experts classified different batches of olives in four categories to extract the parameters related with each c lass. After characterising the processed olives, an algorithm to sort autom atically olives was implemented and tested. Different resolutions were cons idered to study the effect of resolution in the classification results. Fin ally, a comparison between human and machine results is done. (C) 2000 Else vier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.