Evaluation of image processing technique and discriminant analysis methods in postharvest processing of carrot fruit.

The most important process before packaging and preserving agricultural products is sorting operation. Sort of carrot by human labor is involved in many problems such as high cost and product waste. Image processing is a modern method, which has different applications in agriculture including classification and sorting. The aim of this study was to classify carrot based on shape using image processing technique. For this, 135 samples with different regular and irregular shapes were selected. After image acquisition and preprocessing, some features such as length, width, breadth, perimeter, elongation, compactness, roundness, area, eccentricity, centroid, centroid nonhomogeneity, and width nonhomogeneity were extracted. After feature selection, linear discriminant analysis (LDA) and quadratic discriminant analysis (QDA) methods were used to classify the features. The classification accuracies of the methods were 92.59 and 96.30, respectively. It can be stated that image processing is an effective way in improving the traditional carrot sorting techniques.