Parallel processing for produce inspection

Agriculture and the production of food represent some of the most challenging environments for the application of computer systems. This paper reports 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 2000 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 4 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