Parallel processing for produce inspection

Agriculture and the production of food are often seen as relatively low-technology areas. In reality they represent some of the most challenging environments for the application of computer systems. This article reports on the development of a system for grading vegetables and fruit. Because the unit value of even high-quality vegetables is low, they must be inspected at high speeds to make a machine commercially worthwhile. In this work an image-processing system was developed for grading potatoes at up to 200 specimens per minute. The system is under the control of a Motorola 68000 processor which drives a specially designed data-reduction unit operating directly on frames grabbed from the TV camera. The reduced data is routed to four further 68010 processors, all of which are running concurrently. With the exception of the data-reduction unit the system was designed around commercial processor cards communicating via a VME bus. This approach represents a practical solution to a real problem, and the resulting system is now commercially available