Efficient colour sorting of Chios mastiha

Mastiha is the natural aromatic resin extracted from the mastic tree, which grows on the island of Chios, Greece. It is grown traditionally in 24 mastiha villages producing about 150 tonnes annually. Producers collect and sort their mastiha production by hand. This work aims at providing a feasible and implementable solution of an optical sorting algorithm to Chios mastiha producers. The method is based on visual detection and sorting of mastiha samples in the visible spectrum within a controlled setup following a low-cost approach and was found to achieve sorting results of very high accuracy with even more categorisation possibilities.