Visual Perception-Based Statistical Modeling of Complex Grain Image for Product Quality Monitoring and Supervision on Assembly Production Line

PLoS One. 2016 Mar 17;11(3):e0146484. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0146484. eCollection 2016.

Abstract

Computer vision as a fast, low-cost, noncontact, and online monitoring technology has been an important tool to inspect product quality, particularly on a large-scale assembly production line. However, the current industrial vision system is far from satisfactory in the intelligent perception of complex grain images, comprising a large number of local homogeneous fragmentations or patches without distinct foreground and background. We attempt to solve this problem based on the statistical modeling of spatial structures of grain images. We present a physical explanation in advance to indicate that the spatial structures of the complex grain images are subject to a representative Weibull distribution according to the theory of sequential fragmentation, which is well known in the continued comminution of ore grinding. To delineate the spatial structure of the grain image, we present a method of multiscale and omnidirectional Gaussian derivative filtering. Then, a product quality classifier based on sparse multikernel-least squares support vector machine is proposed to solve the low-confidence classification problem of imbalanced data distribution. The proposed method is applied on the assembly line of a food-processing enterprise to classify (or identify) automatically the production quality of rice. The experiments on the real application case, compared with the commonly used methods, illustrate the validity of our method.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Algorithms
  • Edible Grain / anatomy & histology*
  • Food-Processing Industry / methods*
  • Humans
  • Image Processing, Computer-Assisted / methods*
  • Models, Statistical
  • Oryza / anatomy & histology*
  • Pattern Recognition, Automated / methods*
  • Quality Control
  • Support Vector Machine
  • Visual Perception

Grants and funding

This work is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Nos. 61501183, 61571199, 61472134, and 61272337), http://www.nsfc.gov.cn, and is partly supported by the Young Teacher Foundation of Hunan Normal University under Grant Number 11405, Science and Technology Planning Project of Hunan Province of China under Grant Number 2013FJ4051, and Scientific Research Foundation of Educational Commission of Hunan Province of China under Grant Number 13B065.