Computer Vision Based Technique for Surface Defect Detection of Apples

The automatic inspection of quality in fruits is becoming of paramount importance in order to decrease production costs and increase quality standards. Computer vision techniques are used in fruit industry for fruit grading, sorting, and defect detection. In this chapter, we review recent approaches for automatic inspection of quality in fruits using computer vision techniques. Particularly, we focus on the review of advances in computer vision techniques for automatic inspection of quality of apples based on surface defects. Finally, we present our approach to estimate the defects on the surface of an apple using growcut and multi-threshold based segmentation technique. The experimental results show that our method effectively estimates the defects on the surface of apples significantly more effectively than color based segmentation technique.