A new method for lint percentage non-destructive detection based on optical penetration imaging

Lint percentage of seed cotton is one of the important bases for pricing in the trading segment. Unfortunately, the conventional methods of lint percentage are manually operated, which relies on the abundant experience of experts, and restrained by personal, physical and environmental factors. Up to date, the calculation of the lint percentage of seed cotton has not fully automated. In this paper, we proposed a non-destructive detection method for automatically obtaining lint percentage of seed cotton based on optical penetration imaging and machine vision, for the first time to our knowledge. The cotton seed image was obtained by the penetration imaging setup with a LED white backlight source. To accurately identify the number of cotton seeds, the image features of the cotton seed was studied and three key features was been found, which are the circumference, area, and greyscale value, respectively. A calculation system based on the three key features was presented to process the images and then automatically calculate the lint percentage of seed cotton. The first step of the system is to segment the original image using adaptive thresholding followed by morphological operations. Afterwards, the number of cotton seed was obtained by the three key features of the cotton seed. Then, the lint percentage was achieved by a professional industry formula. The suggested lint percentage detection methods were verified by the experiments with two seed cotton varieties samples of H219 and ZHM19. The experimental results indicated that the detection average accuracy of the developed system for seed cotton varieties H219 and ZHM19 were 96.33% and 95.40%.