Bruise detection in apples using infrared imaging

Defects in apples cause food safety concerns touching the general public and strongly affect the commodity market. Due to the increasing incidence, the detection of bruises is a challenge now a day's especially when the bruises are not visible externally. Infrared imaging provides an important window for detection of bruises that are not visible externally. The study has been investigated on the infrared images of both fresh and bruised apples. For our investigation, a new dataset has been designed by maintaining standard acquisition protocol to improve the potentiality and accuracy of the thermograms. The contribution of the investigation includes asymmetric analysis of the acquired thermograms using first and second order statistical analysis and fractal analysis of pre-processed thermograms. Automatic detection of the bruised region was done using anisotropic diffusion and K-means clustering for investigation of the spread of the bruised region.