The malaxing of olive paste is one of the most important sub-processes in the virgin olive oil production process. The master continuously supervises the olive paste inside the themomixer to assess the preparation state of the olive paste and he acts manually over the process variables. The viscosity, granularity, and the presence of olive oil over the paste are the main indicators of the olive paste state. Furthermore, the temperature, time, coadjuvant addition and the shovel speeds are the process variables in the thermomixer. In this work, different image-processing parameters have been proposed to automatically assess the aforementioned indicators and they have been used as inputs in the designed fuzzy controller. Also, the outputs of this controller have been evaluated according to a sequence of images obtained inside the thermomixer and during the malaxing process in a real olive mill.
Keywords: computer vision; expert system; olive oil production process; thermomixer variables.