Journal of Cereal Science 88 (2019) 87–95

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Journal of Cereal Science

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jcs

Colored rice quality inspection system using machine vision T

Shumian Chen, Juntao Xiong , Wentao Guo, Rongbin Bu, Zhenhui Zheng, Yunqi Chen,
∗

Zhengang Yang, Rui Lin

College of Mathematics and Informatics, South China Agricultural University, Guangzhou, 510642, China

ARTICLE INFO ABSTRACT

Keywords: The machine vision-based quality evaluation of colored rice is an important component of achieving automatic
Colored rice rice production and processing. This study took red indica rice as the research object and developed a machine
Machine vision vision system for inspecting flawed rice kernels that are broken, chalky, damaged or spotted. Near infrared
Defect detection images of colored rice samples were collected by the machine vision system. A support vector machine (SVM)
Quality grading
classifier, with the input of the invariant moment ellipse major axis, was applied to identify the broken rice
kernels in the images. Then, the head rice images were obtained, and another SVM performed the gray-level
segmentation. The segmented areas were doubly examined using the centroid distance constraint and the pixel
search positioning method, which allowed the chalky areas to be accurately extracted. Finally, the damaged and
the spotted areas on the rice kernels were detected by using edge detection and morphological methods. The
experimental results show that the recognition accuracy for broken kernels, chalkiness, and damaged and
spotted areas reached 99.3%, 96.3% and 93.6%, respectively. In addition, the average running time of the
proposed method was 0.15 s, with four types of defects detected at one-time. Hence, it was concluded that the
proposed method has significant potential to be applied for rapid and accurate colored rice quality detection and
to provide technical support for the machine vision-based inspection of the automated grading of rice.

1. Introduction
Rice (Oryza sativa L.) is one of the most important food crops
worldwide, and more than one third of the world's population considers
it as their staple food. The market value of rice is greatly influenced by
the quality of its appearance and can be increased by quality grading.
The existing rice grading methods mainly depend on naked eye in-
spections, which are time-consuming and subjective, and the classifi-
cation results are highly susceptible to the experience and state of the
operators. Machine vision could be a faster and more objective method
to determine rice quality, which could greatly assist humans in con-
trolling the detection results and making them more reasonable.
Some current studies use machine vision to detect the quality of the
appearance of rice. Wan et al. (2002) designed an automatic inspection
system to quickly classify rice quality by extracting shape contours,
colors and backlighting features. The test results showed that the
overall accuracy rate was 90.6%, but the recognition accuracies for the
different quality categories greatly differed, and for some quality ca-
tegories, such as immature, cracked, off-type, damaged and broken, the
detection accuracy was quite low. Payman et al. (2018) developed an
expert vision-based system to extract the color and shape characteristics
of rice and set a series of thresholds to detect broken, chalky, red
spotted and black spotted rice kernels. Kaur and Singh (2013) used a
multi-SVM (Multi-Class Support Vector Machine) to identify the chalky
and broken kernels; however, the identification accuracy was not high,
which only reached 86%. Zareiforoush et al. (2015) calculated the
degree of milling (DOM) and percentage of broken kernels (PBK) by
using gray-gradient co-occurrence matrices and kernel length features,
respectively, and the rice quality grade was output based on fuzzy logic.
Nevertheless, noise from the illumination system and the non-uni-
formity of kernels’ whiteness had great influences on the accuracy of
the algorithm, and the robustness of the algorithm has not yet been
verified.
These studies could detect multiple defects of rice, but the accuracy
for the different quality categories exhibited great differences.
Therefore, some studies focused on exploring inspection methods that
could more precisely detect one specific kind of defect. Yoshioka et al.
(2007) proposed two methods, the chalkiness curve method and the
portioning method, to calculate the degree and location of chalkiness,
respectively. The performance of two algorithms were analyzed and

∗
Corresponding author.
E-mail addresses: 1035388024@qq.com (S. Chen), xiongjt2340@163.com (J. Xiong), 943696151@qq.com (W. Guo), boroby@stu.scau.edu.cn (R. Bu),
3424548943@qq.com (Z. Zheng), 601884968@qq.com (Y. Chen), 21818543@qq.com (Z. Yang), limyui@stu.scau.edu.cn (R. Lin).

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jcs.2019.05.010
Received 30 January 2019; Received in revised form 17 May 2019; Accepted 20 May 2019
Available online 21 May 2019
0733-5210/ © 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
S. Chen, et al.
Fig. 1. Layout of the image acquisition system: (a) Composition of the experimental devices, and (b) Environment of image acquisition.
compared, and the test results showed that the overall classification
accuracy of the chalkiness curve method and the portioning method
were 85.4% and 90.2%, respectively. These proposed methods could
accurately recognize rice kernels with different locations and degrees of
chalkiness, but the accuracy for highly similar degrees of chalkiness
needed to be improved. Sun et al. (2014) proposed a convex point
matching method to separate adherent rice kernels and used an SVM
(Support Vector Machine) to calculate the location and degree of
chalkiness to determine the type of rice chalkiness. The proposed
method had wider applications compared to the methods proposed by
Yoshioka et al. (2007). Adherent rice kernels could generally be sepa-
rated using morphological or curvature methods (Lin et al., 2014;
Shatadal et al., 1995; Wang and Paliwal, 2006), while broken rice could
be distinguished from head rice using the geometric features of the rice,
such as the aspect ratio, perimeter, area and minimum enclosing rec-
tangle. After classification, the rice quality grade and adulteration
content could be determined with a recognition accuracy of over 99%
(Aggarwal and Mohan, 2010; Chen et al., 2012; Dalen, 2004). The
fissures of rice grains could be detected by combining image enhance-
ment and edge detection, but the detection accuracies had great dif-
ferences for different sizes of rice grains (Lan et al., 2002). Furthermore,
color features, geometric features and texture features were also widely
used in studies on the detection of the rice milling degree, the calcu-
lation of the percentage of filled rice grains and the identification of rice
varieties (Duan et al., 2011; Liu et al., 2016; Sakai et al., 1996; Wan and
Long, 2011; Zareiforoush et al., 2016).
In summary, there are few systematic studies on rice quality de-
tection. Actually, most of these studies concentrate on classifying par-
tial quality categories because it is difficult to achieve the compre-
hensive detection of rice quality due to the large number of quality
categories. In some of these systematic studies, the classification ac-
curacy often differs greatly for different kinds of defects. Furthermore,
specific studies that focused on certain quality categories may show
relatively poor viability in practical applications. When determining the
quality grades, it is necessary to comprehensively consider the existence
and degree of different defects, and thus these methods may be difficult
to apply. Moreover, the real-time performance have not yet been tested
in most quality detection studies, and we think that this should be a
critical research issue for an efficient algorithm.
Meanwhile, the research objects of current rice quality inspection
studies mainly focus on white rice, but they rarely focus on colored rice.
Colored rice is an important special rice germplasm resource. Because
of its special medicinal value and higher nutritional value than ordinary
white rice, colored rice has good economic value in the agricultural
products market (Itani et al., 2002; Ling et al., 2001; Toyokuni et al.,
2002; Xia et al., 2003; Yang et al., 1998). Since the pigment remains on
the epidermis of the colored rice, it is difficult to detect some defects of
colored rice, such as its chalkiness and color spots, using general vision
inspection methods. Therefore, this study proposed a quality detection
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Journal of Cereal Science 88 (2019) 87–95
method for colored rice based on near infrared images. A machine vi-
sion system was designed for image acquisition and defect detection. A
detection method was developed using image processing techniques to
identify the defective areas. This study aims to realize rapid and ac-
curate quality detection of colored rice. The contribution of this work is
to provide referential and technical support for the quick quality
grading of colored rice on the sorting lines.
2. Materials and methods
2.1. Vision inspection system
A vision inspection system consisting of a computer and an image
acquisition system was designed in this study. The image acquisition
system includes a CCD (Charge-coupled Device) camera (Microvision
CO., Ltd., China; type: MV-300SC), a near infrared back light (LOTS
Automation Technology Co., Ltd., China; type: LTS-2FT8080-IR850)
and a power unit (Youshitai Electronics CO., Ltd., China; type: UST-
AP2U2CHT-24/500). The resolution of the colored rice images that are
captured by the CCD camera is 1736 × 1532 pixels, the size of near
infrared back light is 94 × 94 × 17 mm and the peak wavelength of the
near-infrared light can be adjusted from 850 nm to 940 nm. A mesh grid
with 7 × 7 unit grids was made by a 3D printer. The size of this grid is
customized as 6 cm × 6 cm in order to adapt to the size of the near
infrared backlight and the effective field of view of the camera. The
mesh grid is used to avoid grain adhesion during image collection so
that it can reduce the influence of the captured images on the algo-
rithm. The layout of the image acquisition system is shown as Fig. 1.
The computer controls the image acquisition system that collects the
colored rice images and subsequently processes these images.
As a variety of colored rice, red indica rice was selected to be the
research object in this study. The red rice samples, which were pro-
duced in Bama, Guangxi, China, were collected in October 2018, and
include broken kernels, chalky kernels, damaged kernels, spotted ker-
nels and intact kernels, as shown in Fig. 2a–e. The images of the rice
samples under near infrared light are shown in Fig. 2f–j.
2.2. Visual detection method
After collecting an image, we first used the bicubic interpolation
method to reduce the size of the original gray image to 434 × 383 and
868 × 766. The 434 × 383 gray image was used to detect broken rice
and chalkiness, while the 868 × 766 gray image was used to identify
the damaged and spotted areas. Then, the preprocessing of the red rice
near-infrared images was carried out. The median filter was used to
smooth the images, and the OTSU algorithm (Otsu, 2007) was used to
remove the background. Then, the invariant moment ellipses of the rice
kernels were fit, and the major axis lengths of the ellipses were calcu-
lated. Based on this feature, broken kernels were identified using a
S. Chen, et al.
trained SVM model (Cortes and Vapnik, 1995). Using image subtrac-
tion, the head rice image was obtained. Subsequently, the gray-level
segmentation was performed by a second SVM classifier for the head
rice image. Some segmented areas were determined as being chalky
after being doubly examined using the centroid distance constraint and
the pixel search positioning algorithm. Finally, Sobel edge detection
and morphological processing were mainly applied to detect the da-
maged and spotted areas of the rice kernels. The specific flowchart of
our method is shown in Fig. 3a.
2.2.1. Broken kernels identification
As reported in some related studies, multiple geometric features
were often extracted to distinguish the broken kernels from the head
rice (Aggarwal and Mohan, 2010; Chen et al., 2012; Dalen, 2004;
Zareiforoush et al., 2016). These geometric features mainly include the
grain size, aspect ratio, perimeter, area and so on. Since the object of
this study, red indica rice, is a single rice variety, we found that the
width of the rice with different length is within the same range, which
may be an invalid feature to characterize broken rice. Additionally, the
perimeter and area are related to the grain length. That is, the longer
the grain is, the larger its perimeter and area are. Hence, the perimeter
or area may be redundant for identifying broken red rice kernels. For
this reason, in order to reduce the complexity of the model and accel-
erate the algorithm, we selected the grain length to identify broken
kernels.
Because rice grain contours approximate an ellipse, this study pro-
posed a grain length estimation method to identify broken kernels.
First, the binary image of the rice grain was extracted using the OTSU
method, and the equivalent ellipses based on the second order central
moments of the rice grains were fit, as shown in Fig. 3c. The second
order central moment represents the degree that a random variable
fluctuates around the mean. For mechanical motion, it is regarded as
the rotational inertia with the centroid being the axis of rotation. Ac-
cordingly, it can form an ellipse with constant emissivity that is cen-
tered on the region centroid. An equivalent ellipse has the advantages
of translation invariance and rotation invariance. Therefore, this study
also used the equivalent ellipse based on the second order central
moment to the ‘invariant moment ellipse’. The major axis length of the
invariant moment ellipse could estimate the grain length. Therefore,
the major axis lengths were calculated to train the SVM. The detection
results of broken kernels are shown in Fig. 3d, in which the recognized
broken kernels were marked by rectangles, labeled with their length
and numbered in the original image.
2.2.2. Chalkiness extraction
In related studies, white light illumination was often used to em-
phasize the chalky areas (Jinorose et al., 2010; Sun et al., 2014; Wan
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Journal of Cereal Science 88 (2019) 87–95
Fig. 2. Quality categories of red indica rice and the
near-infrared images of the rice samples: (a) Broken,
(b) Chalky, (c) Intact, (d) Damaged, (e) Spotted, (f)
Broken kernels, (g) Chalky kernels, (h) Intact kernels,
(i) Damaged kernels, and (j) Spotted kernels. (For
interpretation of the references to colour in this
figure legend, the reader is referred to the web ver-
sion of this article.)
et al., 2002; Yoshioka et al., 2007). Compared with white light, near
infrared light has stronger penetrating power for rice grains. Near in-
frared light can enhance the partial chalky areas that are indiscernible
under white light, making it possible to acquire more accurate and
objective detection results.
As Fig. 2g-h shows, compared with normal areas, chalky areas have
lower brightness because of the poorer penetrability of near infrared
light. The brightness of the chalky areas changes within a certain range,
which is positively related to the looseness of the chalkiness. Based on
this characteristic, the gray values of the pixels in the head rice images
were extracted to train the SVM. The SVM performed the image seg-
mentation to roughly separate the chalky areas.
Fig. 4a shows the gray value distribution of 8000 training samples,
including chalky area pixels and normal area pixels, and Fig. 4b is a
gray value boxplot of the training samples. It can be seen from Fig. 4
that the gray values of the chalky areas range from 59 to 110 and are
concentrated in 79–98. Meanwhile, the gray values of the normal areas
are greater, ranging from 108 to 145 and being concentrated in
119–125. The brightness distribution of these two classes have different
ranges and few overlaps, and so using the SVM to classify pixels can
separate candidate chalky areas, as shown in Fig. 3f.
The image after SVM segmentation mainly included the candidate
chalky areas and non-object areas. To accurately extract the chalky
areas, it was necessary to remove the embryo and embryo-aleurone
layer connection areas. According to the structure of rice grains and the
definition of chalkiness in botany, we know that chalky tissue forms in
the endosperm, while the embryo and the aleurone layer are located in
another part of the rice grain. However, under near infrared light, the
embryo and embryo-aleurone layer connection areas are also darker
than most normal areas, thus causing confusion when detecting
chalkiness. To solve this problem, this study proposed a method based
on the centroid distance constraint and the pixel search positioning
algorithm. For an image after SVM segmentation, a centroid distance
constraint was applied to screen the embryos, and then the pixel search
positioning algorithm was used to remove the embryo-aleurone layer
connection areas.
The algorithm of the centroid distance constraint is described as
follows.
Step 1 Let the number of candidate chalky areas be n, and calculate the
centroid set C1 (xi , yi ) of each candidate chalky area and their
corresponding grain centroid set C2 (xj , yj ) (i = j = 1,2, …, n) .
Step 2 Use the Euclidean distance formula, which is shown as follows,
to calculate the centroid distance of each element in set C1 and
the corresponding element in set C2 .
distance = (x i xj )2 + (yi yj ) 2 (1)
S. Chen, et al. Journal of Cereal Science 88 (2019) 87–95

Fig. 3. Flowchart, specific process and detection

results of color rice quality detection algorithm:
(a) Flowchart of the colored rice quality detection
algorithm; (b–d) Broken kernels recognition: (b)
Otsu segmentation, (c) Invariant moment ellipses
of rice grains, and (d) Results of broken kernels
identification; (e–j) Chalkiness detection: (e) Head
rice image, (f) SVM segmentation, (g) Small areas
removal, (h) After centroid distance constraint, (i)
After pixel search positioning, and (j) Results of
chalkiness detection; and (k–p) Detection of da-
maged and spotted areas: (k) Sobel edge detection,
(l) Grain contour, (m) Inner edge information, (n)
Morphological operations, (o) Small areas re-
moval, and (p) Results of defect detection. (For
interpretation of the references to colour in this
figure legend, the reader is referred to the web
version of this article.)

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S. Chen, et al.
Fig. 4. Gray value feature analysis and centroid distance constraint: (a) Gray value distribution of samples, (b) Gray value boxplot of the training samples, and (c)
Graphic description of the centroid distance set.
Step 3 Divide the embryos and chalky areas by removing the areas with
a distance greater than 12 pixels.
A graphic description of the distance set is shown in Fig. 4c, where
the gray points represent the candidate chalky areas that are segmented
by the SVM. The result after the centroid distance constraint is shown in
Fig. 3h, from which we can see that the centroid distance constraint can
effectively remove the embryo areas. Since the embryo-aleurone layer
connection areas can satisfy the centroid distance constraint, it needs to
further locate the chalky areas using the pixel search positioning al-
gorithm.
The pixel search positioning algorithm is given as follows. On the
basis of the centroid distance constraint results, a 3 × 3 pixel neigh-
borhood is defined for each element in the grain centroid set C2 , and we
extract the values of the center pixel and its eight neighboring pixels to
form a pixel matrix of C2 (xj , yj ) , which is given as follows.
v1 v2 v3
PixelValue = v4 C2 (x j , yj ) v6
v7 v8 v9
The class label flag for each candidate chalky area is given by the
following logic rules. For an arbitrary element in the PixelValue matrix
with a nonzero value, set flag = 1, and otherwise set flag = 0 .
Afterwards, the areas with flag = 0 are removed and the areas with
flag = 1 remain as the chalky areas.
The result after using the pixel search positioning algorithm is
shown in Fig. 3i, and the detected chalky areas are marked with red
rectangles and numbered, as shown in Fig. 3j.
Journal of Cereal Science 88 (2019) 87–95
2.2.3. Detection of damaged and spotted areas
Since the shape of the damaged and the spotted areas were similar
under near infrared light, the same process was performed to detect
them in the images. The Sobel gradient operator was used to detect the
edges in gray images, which simultaneously extracted the grain con-
tours and the edges of inner defects, as shown in Fig. 3k. To obtain the
inner defects, the grain contours should be removed. Thereupon, the
Otsu segmentation results were used to detect and dilate the edges of
grain contours, as shown in Fig. 3l. Then, the dilated grain contours
were subtracted from the edge detection results, and the obtained inner
defects were shown in Fig. 3(m). Subsequently, in order to increase the
recognition area of defects, the dilation and close operations were
successively applied to the extracted inner defects, as shown in Fig. 3n.
At last small noises were filtered and pixels of broken and chalky areas
were removed. This study takes the structuring element ‘disk’ in all the
morphological operations, of which the radii for the grain contour di-
lation, inner defects dilation and close operation were 2, 1, and 2, re-
spectively. The detected damaged and spotted areas were shown in
Fig. 3(o). And the defective kernels were marked with blue rectangles
(2) and scattered points in the original image, as shown in Fig. 3(p).
2.3. Model parameters setting
Two SVM models, the broken kernels identification model and the
chalkiness segmentation model, were trained in this study. The selected
training features of them are the major axis length of the invariant
moment ellipse and the pixel gray value, respectively. The sample data
were provided by an image acquisition experiment. The LIBSVM
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S. Chen, et al. Journal of Cereal Science 88 (2019) 87–95

Fig. 5. Linear fitting models and cases of incorrect detection: (a–c) Linear fitting model of different defect detection, (d–f) Results of broken kernels identification,
(g–i) Results of chalkiness detection, and (j–l) Results of damaged and spotted areas detection.

92
S. Chen, et al.
toolbox (Chang and Lin, 2011) was utilized for the training and pre-
diction of the SVM model. In the LIBSVM toolbox, the available kernel
functions include the linear, polynomial, RBF and sigmoid functions.
Therefore, we mainly tested the K-CV accuracy of these four kernel
functions to determine the best kernel function. For the selection of the
SVM parameters, namely, the penalty parameter c and kernel para-
meter g, we applied the grid search algorithm that assigned c and g
values within the range of 2-10 to 210, and then searched the optimal c
and g. For each pair of c and g, the classification accuracy was calcu-
lated using the K-Cross Validation method, and then the (c, g) pair with
the highest accuracy is selected as the optimal parameters of the SVM
model. K was set as 10 in this study. A linear kernel with c = 1 was
selected as the parameters in the broken kernels identification model. In
addition, an RBF kernel with c = 128 and g = 0.03 were set as the
parameters of the chalkiness segmentation model.
3. Experimental design and results analysis
3.1. Image acquisition
The image acquisition experiment was designed to provide a data
set for verifying the accuracy of our proposed method. There were 25
groups of mixed rice (including head rice and broken rice) and 50
groups of head rice that were prepared for the image acquisition, of
which each group of red rice samples contained 45 grains, which is the
maximum capacity of grains in the effective field of view. The image
acquisition method was as follows. A 7 × 7 mesh grid, as shown in
Fig. 1b, was placed upon the object plate of the near infrared back light.
Then, a grain of red indica rice was put into each grid (except for the
four vertices because these areas are not within the effective field of
view), and the red rice images were captured in the image acquisition
box. The above steps were repeated twice for each group of samples
with a total of 150 red rice images being collected, including 50 mixed
rice images and 100 head rice images. The head rice images were used
to train the chalkiness segmentation model and verify its accuracy,
while the mixed rice images were used to obtain the broken kernels
identification model and test the performance of the entire proposed
algorithm. The allocation of the training sets and the testing sets are as
follows. The training set of the broken kernels identification model
included the first 35 mixed rice images, and the remaining 15 images
were used as the testing set. The training set of the chalkiness seg-
mentation model included the first 80 head rice images, and the re-
maining 20 head rice images and 50 mixed rice images were used to-
gether as the training set. The algorithm for damaged and spotted
kernels detection did not need training, and so a total of 150 rice images
were used as the testing set.
3.2. Performance analysis of the detection algorithm
To analyze the efficiency of the proposed algorithm, 6 groups of
Table 1
Detection results and accuracy of different quality categories.
Actual class Number of actual class Correct identification Wrong identification
TP TN FP
Broken kernel 54 49 – –
Head rice 621 – 621 0 –
Chalky area 797 724 – –
Non chalky area 2353 – 2310 43
Damaged and spotted area 1964 1680 – –
Non damaged and spotted area 4786 – 4702 84
Overall 10575 2453 7633 127
a
Rate: Accuracy rate of the algorithm on the test set.
b
Confidence interval: The confidence interval of accuracy rate at the confidence level of 95%.
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Journal of Cereal Science 88 (2019) 87–95
experiments were conducted to detect 50 mixed rice images in batches.
The algorithm development software was MATLAB R2015a using a
computer containing an i7-8700 CPU with a clock speed of 3.20 GHz, a
GeForce GTX 1080 graphics card with 8 GB of memory, and the 64-bit
Windows 10 operating system. In this environment, each of the 50
mixed rice images would be detected repeatedly over 100, 200, 300,
400, 500, and 600 iterations, respectively. The total running time of the
algorithm was calculated, and the average running time for an image
was 0.15 s. This result demonstrates the viability of our method, which
meets the requirements for the rapid quality detection of colored rice.
3.3. Accuracy evaluation
Two recognition experiments, a linear fitting test and an accuracy
test, were designed to evaluate the detection of the proposed algorithm.
The performance of the algorithm was evaluated by analyzing the se-
parate detection results for broken kernels, chalky areas, damaged areas
and spotted areas. The linear fitting experiment was carried out to fit
linear equations to compare the detection results between the algorithm
and a human expert. The correlation coefficient R 2 (0 R2 1) reveals
the relevance between the predicted value and the actual value. The
closer R 2 is to 1, the more reliable the algorithm is. The accuracy ex-
periment assessed the confusion matrices according to the detection
results of different defects to verify the accuracy of the proposed al-
gorithm. In total, 150 images were used in the linear fitting test, and the
accuracy experiment determined the confusion matrices on the test sets
that were allocated in section 3.1.
3.3.1. Recognition of broken kernels
Using the major axis length of the invariant moment ellipse for the
estimation of the grain length, the broken kernels could be accurately
identified. Fig. 5a shows the comparison of the broken kernels detection
results for manual counting and the proposed algorithm. The x-axis
represents the actual number of broken kernels that were detected by
manual counting and the y-axis represents the estimated number of
broken kernels that were detected by the proposed algorithm. The fit
linear equation was y = 0.86x + 0.29, and the correlation coefficient
was R 2= 0.95. The fit R 2 indicates a strong correlation between the
estimated value and the actual value. The confusion matrix of the
broken kernels identification is shown in Table 1, in which the Accu-
racy, Recall and Precision are calculated by the following formulas.
Recall = TP /(TP + FN ) (3)
Precision = TP /(TP + FP ) (4)
Accuracy = (TP + TN )/(TP + TN + FP + FN ) (5)
There were 675 rice grains that were detected in the broken kernels
detection experiment; 670 grains were correctly identified, and 5 grains
were misidentified. The recognition accuracy, the precision rate and the
recall rate were 99.3%, 100% and 90.7%, respectively. Some
Precision (%) Recall (%) Accuracy (%)
FN Ratea Confidence intervalb
5 100 90.7 99.3 [99.29, 99.31]
73- 94.4 90.8 96.3 [96.29, 96.31]
–
284 94.8 91.7 93.6 [93.59, 93.61]
–
362 96.4 91.1 96.4 [96.04, 96.76]
S. Chen, et al.
recognition results are shown in Fig. 5d–f. The green rectangles show
correct identifications while the pink rectangles show missed identifi-
cations. The reasons for the low recall rate is that the length of a few
broken kernels are close to some head rice that are much shorter than
its normal size, resulting in incorrect identifications. For example, as
shown in Fig. 5d-e, the broken kernels within pink rectangles (with
lengths of 32.86, 35.18 and 38.93, respectively) were very similar to
the head rice within pink rectangles (with the length being 32.69) in
Fig. 5f. The SVM outputs the incorrect class labels when analyzing these
broken kernels.
3.3.2. Chalkiness recognition
Using SVM segmentation, the centroid distance constraint and pixel
search positioning, the chalkiness of red indica rice can be accurately
extracted. The fit linear equation for chalkiness detection was
y = 0.91x + 0.60 , and the R2 = 0.95. As shown in Table 1, among the
3150 grains, 3034 grains were correctly identified while 116 grains
were incorrectly identified, and the recognition accuracy, precision rate
and recall rate were 96.3%, 94.4% and 90.8%, respectively. This result
proves the validity of our detection method for chalky areas. Fig. 5g–i
shows some results of chalkiness detection in which red rectangles re-
present the recognized chalky areas. There were some incorrect iden-
tifications that were caused by the following reasons. (1) A connected
area was sometimes formed by the embryo and its adjacent spotted
area, and it could meet the conditions of the centroid distance con-
straint and pixel search positioning. As a result, these areas were
identified as chalky, which are shown as the No. 8 red rectangle in
Fig. 5g and the No. 2 red rectangle in Fig. 5i. (2) A very few intact
kernels with thicker pericarps had lower brightness under near infrared
light, which is shown as the No. 8 red rectangle in Fig. 5i and were
incorrectly identified as chalky. (3) Since only the chalkiness in head
rice could be detected, some of the broken rice that was previously
omitted were misidentified as chalky, which is shown as the No. 3 red
rectangle in Fig. 5h. The blue rectangles in Fig. 5g show some missed
identification cases. The reasons for the low recall rate are as follows.
(1) Some areas with low chalkiness have brightness that is similar to
normal areas, thus making them easy to be misrecognized, as shown by
the No. 1 blue rectangle in Fig. 5g. (2) The chalky area that was located
far from the center of the grain and near the edge was removed during
the centroid distance constraint and pixel search positioning opera-
tions, as shown by the No. 2 blue rectangle in Fig. 5g.
3.3.3. Damaged and spotted areas detection
The damaged and spotted areas were detected mainly using edge
detection and morphological methods. The fit linear equation for the
detection was y = 0.92x 1.07 , and the R2 = 0.87 . The recognition ac-
curacy, precision rate and recall rate were 93.6%, 94.8% and 91.7%,
respectively. As Fig. 5j-l shows, most of the damaged and spotted areas
could be correctly detected. However, some broken kernels, embryos
and chalkiness were misidentified, which are shown as the No. 8, No.
12 and No. 17 blue rectangles in Fig. 5k and the No. 4 and No. 21 blue
rectangles in Fig. 5l. The results are caused by the missing recognition
of broken kernels and the incomplete segmentation of the chalkiness.
The yellow rectangles in Fig. 5j-k shows the grains with damaged and
spotted areas that were not correctly detected, and the reasons are as
follows. (1) The color of some defective areas was not obvious or the
gradient of the gray value around the defective areas slightly varied,
especially the spots at the grain edge, thus making it difficult to extract
their edge information, as shown by the No. 1, No. 2, No. 4, and No. 5
yellow rectangles in Fig. 5j. (2) A few spots were so small that they were
removed as noises during the morphological process, as shown by the
No. 3 yellow rectangle in Fig. 5j. (3) The overlap of a spotted area and
chalky area was detected as being chalky, as shown by the No. 1 yellow
rectangle in Fig. 5k. (4) A small number of damaged and spotted areas
were previously mistakenly recognized as chalky areas, resulting in the
removal of the related defect information, as shown by the No. 2 yellow
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Journal of Cereal Science 88 (2019) 87–95
rectangle in Fig. 5k.
In summary, the proposed method for colored rice quality detection
can effectively identify different defects with a few misidentifications
and missed identifications. To solve the existing problems, we will
perform the following measures to improve the algorithm. (1) We will
improve the image acquisition devices by adding front white lighting,
acquire red indica rice images under different light sources and detect
different defects under certain light sources to reduce the interference
among the different defect detection results. (2) We will apply deep
learning methods to include more classification features and then train
a more robust recognition network that can optimize the existing al-
gorithm. For example, this approach would allow the damaged areas
and the spots to be distinguished, and the accuracy of the algorithm
should be improved.
4. Conclusion
Machine vision is a key technology to achieve the intelligent rice
production. A machine vision-based quality detection method for co-
lored rice based on near infrared images was proposed in this study, and
the experiments were designed to verify the validity and feasibility of
the proposed method.
(1) Taking red indica rice as the research object, a machine vision
system for colored rice was designed, and image experiments were
carried out in this study. The proposed algorithm detected the
broken kernels, chalkiness, damaged areas and spotted areas with
an average running time of 0.15 s, which could achieve rapid
quality detection of colored rice.
(2) The correlation coefficients R2 of the fit linear equations were all
greater than 0.87, which shows that the prediction of the algorithm
is reliable. The accuracy of broken kernels identification, chalkiness
detection and the damaged and spotted areas detection were
99.3%, 96.3% and 93.6%, respectively. The overall accuracy of the
algorithm reached 96.4% on average. The experimental results
demonstrate the good recognition performance of the proposed
algorithm.
In conclusion, a fusion of near infrared imaging and machine vision
is included in the proposed method for colored rice quality detection.
The method based on near infrared images that is proposed in this
paper can provide technical support for the rapid quality inspection of
colored rice on the sorting lines. At the same time, the near-infrared
detection method can also be applied to the quality detection of white
rice, and it can also provide referential values for other crops, such as
soybeans and corn. In future work, we will design a double-light vision
system, improve the algorithm using a combination of deep learning
and image processing techniques, and finally realize the real-time
quality detection and grading of colored rice on the sorting lines.
Conflicts of interest
The authors declare no conflict of interest.
Author contributions
Chen, S and Xiong, J conceived and designed the experiments;
Chen, S. and Guo, W. and Zheng, Z. performed the experiments and
analyzed the data; Chen, S and Xiong, J. and Bu, R. and Yang, Z. and
Chen, Y. and Lin, R. wrote the paper.
Acknowledgments
This work is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation
of China (Nos. 31201135, 31571568), the Natural Science Foundation
of Guangdong (No. 2018A030313330), Science and Technology Plan
S. Chen, et al. Journal of Cereal Science 88 (2019) 87–95

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