Journal of Food, Agriculture and Environment

Feasibility of impact-acoustic emissions for discriminating between potato tubers and clods

Author(s):

Adel Hosainpour ^*, Mohammad H. Komarizade, Asghar Mahmoudi, Mahrokh G. Shayesteh

Recieved Date: 2009-09-02, Accepted Date: 2010-04-02

Abstract:

Separating clods from potato tubers is one of the most challenging jobs in a potato harvester. Discriminating between potato tubers and clods is the first step in developing an automatic separation system on potato harvesters. In this study, an acoustic-based intelligent system was developed for high speed discriminating between potato tubers and clods. About 500kg mixture of potato tubers and clods were loaded on a belt conveyer and were impacted against a steel plate at four different velocities. The resulting acoustic signals were recorded, processed and potential features were extracted from the analysis of sound signals in both time and frequency domains. Experiment was performed in off-line and on-line stages. In off-line experiments, potential features were extracted from analysis of emitted sound signals, whereas in on-line stage, extracted features were used in real-time detection of clods and potato tubers. A multilayer perceptron neural network with a back propagation algorithm was used for pattern recognition. Altogether, 17 potential discriminating features were selected and fed as input vectors to the artificial neural network models. Optimal network was selected based on mean square error, correct detection rate and correlation coefficient. At the belt velocity of 1 m s^-1, detection accuracy of the presented system was about 97.3% and 97.6% for potatoes and clods, respectively. Increasing the belt velocity resulted in the reduction of detection accuracy and increase in the number of miss classified samples. By using this system, it is expected that a potato harvester may operate at a capacity of 20 ton hr^-1 with the accuracy of about 97%.

Keywords:

Acoustics, clod, discriminating, neural networks, potato, separation

---

Journal: Journal of Food, Agriculture and Environment
Year: 2010
Volume: 8
Issue: 2
Category: Agriculture
Pages: 565-569

---

Full text for Subscribers

---

Information:

Note to users

The requested document is freely available only to subscribers/registered users with an online subscription to the Journal of Food, Agriculture & Environment. If you have set up a personal subscription to this title please enter your user name and password. All abstracts are available for free.

Article purchasing

If you like to purchase this specific document such as article, review or this journal issue, contact us. Specify the title of the article or review, issue, number, volume and date of the publication. Software and compilation, Science & Technology, all rights reserved. Your use of this website details or service is governed by terms of use. Authors are invited to check from time to time news or information.

---

Purchase this Article:   20 Purchase PDF Order Reprints for 15

---

Share this article :