A method of determining cut position of automatic stem removal system for salted wakame

Abstract

In the wakame manufacturing procedure, the manual operation process of stem removal is known to hinder the production process. In order to solve this problem, the manufacture aspires to develop an automatic wakame stem removal system. The purpose of this paper is to propose a cut position detection method for the system by picking up the characteristic changes that appear at the cross section of the wakame. In this method, with the utilization of exposure control, two images are captured from the same cross section that is made by a developed device. These images are used in the segmentation of the cross section. The positions where the stem should be cut can then be determined through the examination of the thickness of the cross section. To test the performance of the proposed method, 100 cross sections were generated from the roots of 10 samples of the salt-preserved wakame with an interval of 20 mm. In the experiments, the proposed method gave good results to find the cut positions except some misdetection. The experimental results showed that this method is effective and usable to the automatic stem removal system.