Salted Egg Cleaning and Grading System Using Machine Vision

Abstract

The electro-mechanical salted egg grading system was developed to support producers by streamlining the cleaning process, delivering a sorted outcome, saving time, decrease human resources needs, labor costs, and minimized egg breakage, consequently boosting production efficiency. OpenCV (Open Source Computer Vision Library) was employed as a development platform and the Raspberry Pi 3 Model B as a microcomputer due to its speedier and more powerful CPU, which is required to operate the system's components and process the acquired images for classification. In addition, a Raspberry Pi camera module V2 was employed to capture the images for scanning, LED bulb for candling, and an SG90 micro servo for sorting. Furthermore, we used B66 and B35 V-belts for the conveyor assembly. An induction motor of 0.125 horse power is used to rotate the conveyor assembly, a chain, and sprocket to reduce its speed. The researchers also used soft bristles brushes which are ideal for cleaning the eggshell. For cleansing, sprinklers were used along with the water PVC pipe that holds pressurized water of 30 psi. The camera's captured images are categorized as clean, dirty, well-pickled, and spoilt eggs. Empirical results exhibited that the detection accuracy achieved 96% and 93% for cleanliness and quality, respectively. It establishes the model and prototype's robustness in cleaning, sorting, and grading salted eggs.