Quality Assessment of Thai Rice Kernels Using Low Cost Digital Image Processing System

This paper presents a low cost digital image processing system for quality assessment of Thai rice kernels. Nowadays, Thailand is the top country which export rice into the world market, according to the mention of the Rice Trader, the export volume is 9,883,288 tons in 2016 and export value is 154,434 million baht or 4,401 million dollars. Thai rice quality is controlled by rice department, ministry of commerce Thailand in order to guarantee the quality in market including prices base on grade of rice quality. Thence, quality assessment of Thai rice kernels is required. Quality assessment or grading of Thai rice kernels usually use manual operation by person in cooperating with equipment called micrometer to measure geometrical features such as length, width, and area of rice kernels. This method takes a long time and also gives uncertainty in results due to eye fatigue because size of rice kernels is very small. Therefore, an image processing technique is then applied to measure size of Thai rice kernels. Proposed system consists of flatbed scanner and image processing algorithm which correspond to measure of Thai rice kernels. The low cost system for quality assessment of Thai rice kernels can be delivered to Thai rice industry, the certainty of results and speed of quality assessment can be significantly improved.