Abstract

Nowadays in dried fruit producing factories, aflatoxin contaminated dried figs inspection and separation is of great importance, and also time and money-consuming process. In most of the factories all over the world, this process is done manually by using specialized labors in a dark room, and under the UV lights. Working under such difficult conditions reduces workers’ productivity and also may lead to some health problems in some cases. Aflatoxin contaminated figs produce bright greenish yellow fluorescence under UV light which is used for separation process. The correlation between fluorescence production and the presence of aflatoxin in fig samples is quite high. There are some machine visions systems which are used for dried fig inspection automatically but, their accuracy are still under 80% because of some unsolved technical problems.

These problems are the reason for application of manual inspecting methods alone or in line with automated inspection systems. Like any other techniques, use of machine vision techniques has some advantages and also some disadvantages.

The aim of this study is to review the current position of machine vision in dried fig fruit sorting systems. It is also proposed to define the problems of machine vision applications for fig fruit sorting and also give some solutions for increasing the efficiency of automatic sorting systems.