A method for classifying citrus surface defects based on machine vision

When detecting citrus surface defects, the performance of machine vision system is affected by different aspects such as the size, shape and environment. Therefore, a method for classifying citrus surface defects based on machine vision was proposed in this paper. First, the Fuzzy C-Means algorithm optimized by the Gray Wolf Optimizer algorithm was used to preprocess the citrus image. The citrus in the image was separated from the background; Then, the improved convolutional neural network combined with the State Transfer Algorithm (STA) was used to identify the citrus surface defects. We selected 2000 Tribute Citrus, 1000 ones with and without the defects separately, to carry on the experiment. The identification accuracy of the trained model on the dataset was 99.1%. In order to verify the effectiveness of the model in complex background, the convolutional neural network in combination with a STA was compared with SVM, AlexNet, VGG16 and other methods. The experimental results show that the citrus surface defect classification method based on machine vision is effective.