The paper covers the problem of determination of defects and contamination in malting barley grains. The analysis of the problem indicated that although several attempts have been made, there are still no effective methods of identification of the quality of barley grains, such as the use of information technology, including intelligent sensors (currently, quality assessment of grain is performed manually). The aim of the study was the construction of a reduced set of the most important graphic descriptors from machine-collected digital images, important in the process of neural evaluation of the quality of BOJOS variety malting barley. Grains were sorted into three size fractions and seed images were collected. As a large number of graphic descriptors implied difficulties in the development and operation of neural classifiers, a PCA (Principal Component Analysis) statistical method of reducing empirical data contained in the analyzed set was applied. The grain quality expressed by an optimal set of transformed descriptors was modelled using artificial neural networks (ANN). The input layer consisted of eight neurons with a linear Postsynaptic Function (PSP) and a linear activation function. The one hidden layer was composed of sigmoid neurons having a linear PSP function and a logistic activation function. One sigmoid neuron was the output of the network. The results obtained show that neural identification of digital images with application of Principal Component Analysis (PCA) combined with neural classification is an effective tool supporting the process of rapid and reliable quality assessment of BOJOS malting barley grains.
Keywords: PCA (principal component analysis); classification of quality; compression of graphical data; digital image; graphic descriptors; malting barley.