The International Journal of Advanced Manufacturing Technology

https://doi.org/10.1007/s00170-020-06226-5

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

Machine vision system for quality inspection of beans

Peterson Adriano Belan 1 & Robson Aparecido Gomes de Macedo 1 & Wonder Alexandre Luz Alves 1 &
José Carlos Curvelo Santana 2 & Sidnei Alves Araújo 1

Received: 6 July 2020 / Accepted: 7 October 2020

# Springer-Verlag London Ltd., part of Springer Nature 2020

Abstract
This paper presents a machine vision system (MVS) for visual quality inspection of beans which is composed by a set of software
and hardware. The software was built from proposed approaches for segmentation, classification, and defect detection, and the
hardware consists of equipment developed with low-cost electromechanical materials. Experiments were conducted in two
modes: offline and online. For offline experiments, aimed at evaluating the proposed approaches, we composed a database
containing 270 images of samples of beans with different mixtures of skin colors and defects. In the online mode, the beans
contained in a batch, for example, a bag of 1 kg, are spilled continuously on the conveyor belt for the MVS to perform the
inspection, similar to what occurs in an automated industrial visual inspection process. In the offline experiments, our approaches
for segmentation, classification, and defect detection achieved, respectively, the average success rates of 99.6%, 99.6%, and
90.0%. In addition, the results obtained in the online mode demonstrated the robustness and viability of the proposed MVS, since
it is capable to analyze an image of 1280 × 720 pixels, spending only 1.5 s, with average successes rates of 98.5%, 97.8%, and
85.0%, respectively, to segment, classify, and detect defects in the grains contained in each analyzed image.

Keywords Machine vision . Automatic inspection . Visual quality . Grains . Beans

1 Introduction product’s market price. Thus, visual quality inspection is a

Beans are a legume cultivated in almost all countries with tropical
and subtropical climate and are of great importance in human
nutrition since they consist in a food of significant nutritional
value [1]. The largest world producers of beans are Myanmar,
India, Brazil, the USA, Mexico, and Tanzania, in that order,
which are responsible for approximately 60% of the world pro-
duction of grain [2]. Brazil is the world’s largest producer and
consumer of common beans (Phaseolus vulgaris L.). In fact,
beans and rice form the basis of the diet of the Brazilian people.
An extremely important issue in the commercialization of
agricultural grains, both in relation to the purchase and the
sale, is their visual quality, which is assessed from properties
such as color, shape, and size, which generally impact the
* Sidnei Alves Araújo
saraujo@uni9.pro
1
Informatics and Knowledge Management Post Graduate Program,
Nove de Julho University - UNINOVE, Rua Vergueiro, 235/249,
Liberdade, São Paulo, SP 01504-001, Brazil
2
Federal University of ABC, Av. dos Estados, 5001, Bangu, Santo
André, SP 09210-580, Brazil
task of great importance for most agricultural products
[3–5]. However, it is very common for such tasks to be carried
out manually, which can be time-consuming increasing oper-
ating costs, in addition to being subject to human error and
presenting difficulties in standardizing results [6–9].
The quality inspection of Brazilian beans, for example, is
conducted manually following a set of standards and proce-
dures of the Brazilian Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock and
Supply, BMALS, and can be briefly described as follows: a
sample of 1 kg is extracted from a lot of beans and is divided
into four equal subsamples of 250 g, one of which is intended
for visual inspection. Then, the foreign matter and impurities
are separated using a circular sieve with holes of 5 mm of
diameter and finally a visual inspection of the subsample (after
extraction of foreign matter and impurities) is performed to
determine the group, class, and type of the product according
to the reference values established by BMALS [10]. The
group is related to the botanical species (Phaseolus vulgaris
L.—Group I; and Vigna unguiculata (L)—Group II), the class
depends on the skin color of the grains contained in the
inspected subsample (black, white, colored, or mixed) and
the type is determined according to the defects found.
Among the defects found in bean grains are broken, bored

by insect, moldy, burned, crushed, chopped, sprouted, wrin-
kled, stained, and discolored [10, 11]. The main problems
associated with the current bean quality inspection process
are the high probability of occurrence of errors and the diffi-
culty for standardizing the results.
In this context, a computer vision system (CVS) capable of
spatially locating each grain in a sample, classifying it accord-
ing to the color of its skin and identifying defects, constitutes
an important practical application to assist in the product qual-
ity inspection process. In fact, computer vision systems repre-
sent an important alternative for the automation of visual in-
spection tasks, since they can save time and industrial costs,
and can improve the quality of the products. Because of this,
computer vision can be considered as one of the keys for
achieving industry 4.0 [12].
In the last two decades, many works have been presented in
the literature proposing the development of computer systems
to assist visual inspection quality of several agricultural grains
such as rice [3, 13–19]; coffee bean [20–22]; beans [7, 9,
23–28]; and other grains [8, 13, 29, 30]. Such works corrob-
orate the importance of the topic addressed in this work.
This work presents the development of a machine vision sys-
tem (MVS), composed by a set of hardware and software, which
is applicable to the process of visual quality inspection of beans.
Although the software of the proposed MVS has been designed
to deal with Brazilian beans (class and type determination), it can
be adapted to deal with beans from other countries.
The main contributions of this work are (i) development of
a fast and robust approach to segment grains capable of spa-
tially locating each grain, even in the cases where there are
many grains glued to each other (touching grains); (ii) devel-
opment of approaches based on artificial neural networks and
convolutional neural networks for classification and detection
of defects; (iii) design and development of an equipment for
visual quality inspection of Brazilian beans; and (iv) compo-
sition of an image database that was used in the experiments
and will be available in the literature so that other researchers
can evaluate and compare their methods.
2 Related works
In the literature, there are several works proposing the use of
computer vision systems (CVS) for analysis and classification
of seeds and grains. However, there are very few works deal-
ing with automatic visual inspection of beans.
In [7], the authors proposed a CVS for classification of
beans based on the color and size of grains using morpholog-
ical operations, color histograms, and an artificial neural net-
work. The classification success rate obtained in this work was
90.6%.
In [13], a CVS to classify seeds, beans, and cereals is pre-
sented. However, in the experiments conducted in this work,
Int J Adv Manuf Technol
only grains of rice and lentils were considered. For both
grains, the obtained average accuracy was close to 95%.
The authors of [23] proposed a CVS to identify six varieties
of beans grown in Italy from attributes such as size, shape,
color, and texture of the grains, which achieved a success rate
of 99.56%. The same authors conducted other experiments,
reported in [24], taking into account fifteen varieties of Italian
beans, where they achieved a success rate of 98.49%.
In the work [25], image processing techniques were
employed to evaluate changes in the color of beans during
storage in order to correlate these changes with a phenomenon
called “hard to cook grains.” The results showed the existence
of the investigated correlation and confirmed the efficiency of
the approach proposed by them.
In [31], the authors proposed a CVS to identify ten varieties
of beans grown in Iran, which employs a multilayer
perceptron artificial neural network (MLP-ANN) to classify
the grains from color features. However, different from most
of the works addressing bean classification, the results obtain-
ed in this work were expressed only in terms of sensibility
(96%) and specificity (97.1%).
In [32], the authors proposed a method for fast quality
control of red beans, which first maps the pixels belonging
to the grains, extracting them from the blue background, and
then classifies those pixels using an algorithm based on the
fuzzy C-means clustering (FCM), to determine the mixture of
other types of commercial beans as well as low discolored red
beans, in the analyzed sample. In their experiments, they re-
port accuracies varying from 10 to 96% depending on the
mixture of colors and textures of the grains contained in the
analyzed sample.
The works [7, 13, 23–25, 32] show the need and the im-
portance of computer systems for bean inspection. However,
the systems developed in these works do not spatially localize
the grains. In addition, the proposed approaches for segmen-
tation fail in images with “glued” grains (touching grains). For
this reason, in the experiments carried out in these works, the
grains are placed purposely spaced from each other before the
image acquisition to facilitate the segmentation [7, 13, 23, 24],
or only previously segmented grains are processed [25, 31], or
the grains are not isolated from each other before performing
the classification [32]. This limitation hinders the applicability
of such systems in industrial processes of visual inspection.
In [33], the authors proposed a CVS that uses cross-
correlation-based granulometry in the segmentation step
and a k-means-based algorithm that evaluate the predomi-
nant color of each grain, classifying it into three possible
classes (Carioca, Mulatto, or Black). Although the segmen-
tation algorithm proposed in this work is able to solve the
problem of touching grains, the computational time spent
in this step makes unfeasible the practical application of
the proposed CVS, which takes 18 s on average to process
an image of 800 × 600 pixels (6 s for pre-processing, 11 s
Int J Adv Manuf Technol
for segmentation, and 1 s for grain classification). In such
work, the success rates of 99.88% and 99.99% were ob-
tained, respectively, in the segmentation and classification
steps. To the best of our knowledge, this is the work that
presents the best success rates in the tasks of segmentation
and classification of beans.
The authors of [26] proposed a CVS to classify beans that
employs two pre-processing steps, the first based on the
nearest neighbor algorithm to remove the background and
the second using the ultimate grain filter (UFG) technique
[34] to remove possible residual noise from the previous step.
Then, they applied the watershed transform (WT) to segment
the grains and the algorithm proposed in [33] for classifica-
tion. The proposed CVS takes 3.8 s to process an image of 800
× 600 pixels, obtaining the success rates of 98.87% for seg-
mentation and 99.95% for classification. The reduction in
processing time was presented by the authors as a contribution
of this work.
In [27], a CVS for classification of the three beans most
consumed in Brazil (Carioca, Mulatto, and Black) is present-
ed. In the segmentation step, the watershed transform (WT)
was combined with heuristics that analyze the size of seg-
ments (connected components), being able to separate them
in two or more grains or join one or more segments that pos-
sibly belong to the same grain. The classification step employs
a multilayer perceptron artificial neural network (MLP-ANN),
which was trained using a set of color features extracted from
the grains. According to the authors, the proposed CVS is
capable of processing an image of 1280 × 720 pixels in ap-
proximately 1 s with hit rates of 97.39% and 99.14% for
segmentation and classification, respectively.
In [28], improvements were made in the CVS proposed in
[27], adding the cross-correlation granulometry (GCC) tech-
nique in the segmentation step. In these works, GCC is
employed only in cases where the segmentation by WT fails.
Such improvements allowed decreasing the processing time to
less than 1 s with success rates above 99%. Although the
approaches proposed in such works have allowed a drastic
reduction in processing time, they have not managed to repro-
duce the success rates obtained by [33].
In [35], the authors proposed a CVS for automatic bean
classification. To this end, they evaluated the performance of
support vector machine (SVM) and random forest (RF) algo-
rithms in classifying local and global features extracted from
the segmented grains, which are combined using a bag-of-
feature (BoF) method. According to the authors, the best ac-
curacy (98.5%) was achieved using RF and global features.
Although the authors mention that the beans are segmented
using the WT algorithm, they do not present results obtained
in the segmentation step.
As can be perceived, in the most recent research that deals
with visual inspection of beans, investments have been made
especially in the segmentation step to obtain a robust approach
(capable of spatially localizing the grains even if they are
glued together) with low computational cost, aiming to pro-
vide the development of systems that can be employed in
industrial processes of visual inspection. It can also be noted
that none of the reported works explores the detection of de-
fects in the beans, perhaps due to the difficulty of extracting
features in very small regions of interest. These findings have
motivated the development of the segmentation and defect
detection approaches proposed in this work.
It is worth mentioning that the results reported above were
obtained in experiments using sets of images previously ac-
quired, which we call in this work “offline mode.” Only [33]
conducted experiments also in “online mode,” in which the
grains of a batch are spilled continuously on the conveyor belt
to be inspected by the CVS. Obviously, in this mode, the
results obtained (overall success rate of 91.33%, including
segmentation and classification) were much lower than those
achieved in the same work in offline mode (99.88% and
99.99% in the segmentation and classification steps).
Regarding the physical devices used in experiments to
evaluate the computer vision systems for inspecting grains,
in the literature, there are simple mechanisms to control light-
ing conditions during image acquisition [7, 13, 25]; low-cost
prototypes composed by grain input box, conveyor belt, and
image acquisition chamber as those proposed by [33, 36]; and
mechatronic devices for image acquisition such as those pre-
sented in [37, 38]. The only complete equipment found in the
literature was proposed by [18], for inspection of rice grains.
According to the authors, the equipment is capable of carrying
out all stages of the process of inspecting the visual quality of
the product, from peeling to classification, which is based on
the shape and size of the grains. Regarding performance, the
authors report only that the equipment proved to be 31.3%
more efficient than manual inspection, considering the time
spent in the analysis and the classification accuracy. They also
mention that the average time to process each image is 7.33 s.
The lack of specific equipment for visual quality inspection
of beans has motivated the development of the equipment that
composes the MVS proposed in this work.
3 Proposed approaches for segmentation,
classification, and detection of defects
of beans
3.1 Segmentation
Consider as input a RGB color image denoted by a function
I RGB : D→K that maps a rectangular grid D⊆ℤ 2 into a set of
color intensities K ¼ f0; 1; …; 255g3 ; being 3 the number of
bands of RGB color space. Consider also that each pixel of
IRGB is represented by , whose values

and denote the horizontal and vertical coordinates of
. in which the opening operation is applied.
The first step of segmentation consists in converting the
input RGB image (IRGB) to the CIELab color space generating
ILab. Then, using a pre-processing step proposed by [33] each
pixel of ILab is mapped to two gray levels in Igray, in which
typical bean colors are represented by the darker tone (black)
and the typical background colors are represented by the ligh-
ter tone (white). However, differently from [33] in which a
training is done for each image using the k-NN algorithm
(with k = 1), we employed a lookup table (LUT) to compute
this mapping more efficiently. Once LUT is created, it is pos-
sible to describe the mapping process to remove the back-
ground of the image by Eq. 1.
ð1Þ
In the sequence, the morphological opening operator (Eq.
2) is applied in Igray to remove small connected components,
considered as noise.


A ¼ δee εee I gray ð2Þ
where δ is the dilation operation, ε represents the erosion
where CC(Igray) is the connected component extracted from
Igray, NCC is the normalized cross-correlation operation, and
T is the template belonging to the set of templates T p.
The working of segmentation approach, including all steps
of processing, is shown in Fig. 2.
As the segmentation using CCG requires a lot of process-
ing time as demonstrated in [33], we first conduct a previous
segmentation using WT and the heuristic to joining fragments
of grains and then apply CCG to refine the segmentation.
Thus, our approach achieved a result very close to that
achieved in [33], with a much lower processing time (0.1 s,
in average).
3.2 Classification
The grain classification consists in labeling each grain from
the segmented image (Iseg) to one of the three classes consid-
ered in this work, that is, Carioca (C), Mulatto (M), or Black
Fig. 1 Some examples of elliptical templates (T p ) employed in the proposed segmentation approach
Int J Adv Manuf Technol
operation, ee is the structuring element, and Igray is the image
The next step is the application of the watershed transform
(WT), using distance transform (Euclidean distance), to seg-
ment the grains in Igray. As WT is very susceptible to the
problem of super-segmentation [39], we use some information
such as average grain size and distance between the centers of
two grains to join two or more fragments erroneously divided
by WT. In other words, the joining (J) of two or more com-
ponents is done when the distance between their centers is less
than the average size of a grain and the sum of their areas is
less than or equal to the minimum area of the average grain
size. Such values are predefined based on all images of the
employed database.
Finally, the cross-correlation granulometry (CCG) tech-
nique, described in [33] and mathematically formulated in
Eq. 3, is applied in regions of Igray where WT was not able
to segment correctly the grains. These regions are identified
by connected components considered too large (at least 1.6
times of the average grain size). However, instead of the 162
templates originally used in [33], we employed a set of 72
elliptical templates (T p ) defined from 4 scales and 18 rotation
angles at each scale. Some of them are illustrated in Fig. 1.
ð3Þ
(B). The proposed approach employs a multilayer perceptron
(MLP) ANN with the following architecture: 20 neurons in
the input layer, a hidden layer with 45 neurons, and three
neurons in the output layer to indicate the class of a segmented
grain.
The feature vector v presented in the MLP input layer is
composed by 20 average values of RGB and CIELab color

components v ¼ R; G; B; a; b; extracted from pixels over
4 circular projections starting from the center of a grain, as
illustrated in Fig. 3. This way of feature extraction was based
on the work of [40]. In addition, disregarding the component L
from CIELab color system increases the invariance of the
feature vector to changes in lighting.
The MLP training was carried out using a set of 400 vectors
extracted from images not belonging to the datasets employed
to evaluate the classification approach. Other configuration
parameters adopted in the training were stop criteria = number
of epochs (1000) or error 10–5 and learning rate = 0.05.
Int J Adv Manuf Technol

Fig. 2 Segmentation steps. a

Input image (IRGB), b mapped
image (Igray), c result of
segmentation by WT, d
application of CCG + joining (J)
grains step, and e final result of
segmentation approach (Iseg)

(a) (b)

(c) (d)

(e)

Fig. 3 Architecture of MLP

employed for beans classification
 Int J Adv Manuf Technol

Fig. 4 Final result of

classification approach

In summary, the purpose of classification approach is to  

 1 1 
7
extract a vector of features vi from each grain of Iseg, consid- 
ering the RGB and CIELab color spaces, and map it into a
class ci ∈ {C, M, B}, generating an output image similar to that
shown in Fig. 4.
Although the classification of grains may seem easy, some
mistakes can occur in this task because there are many cases
where brown streaks cover a considerable area of Carioca
bean, making it very similar to Mulatto bean, as can be ob-
served in Figs. 2, 3, and 4.
3.3 Detection of defects
The defect detection consists of analyzing each grain of the
segmented image (Iseg) and labeling those that have one or
more of the three defects considered in this work. The ap-
proaches for detecting such defects are described in Sections
3.3.1, 3.3.2, and 3.3.3 below.
3.3.1 Broken beans
As we have known, the shape of a whole bean grain is very
close to an ellipse. Thus, the detection of a broken bean can be
done using some algorithm that extracts the signature of a
segmented CC and compares it with the signature extracted
from the image of an ellipse or from an image of a grain
considered as standard.
The analysis of the broken grain signature, described
by Eqs. 4 to 6, is conducted using the seven invariant
moments of Hu [41]. Basically, we compute the differ-
ence between signature (diff _ sign) of the grain under
analysis and a standard grain. If diff _ sign is greater than
a threshold (t _ diff _ sign), then the grain is considered as
broken. In our experiments, we adopted t _ diff _ sign =
0.4 (obtained experimentally).
diff signðA; BÞ ¼ ∑  A − B  ð4Þ
i¼1 mi mi


mAi ¼ −sign hAi :log hAi ð5Þ


mBi ¼ −sign hBi :log hBi ð6Þ
where hAi ; hBi are, respectively, the seven invariant Hu mo-
ments calculated from the analyzed object A (connected com-
ponent extracted from the segmented image) and the object B
representing a standard grain.
After each grain in the segmented image is analyzed, those
identified as broken (diff _ sign > t _ diff _ sign) are labeled, as
shown in Fig. 5.
Obviously, the grain signature could be extracted using
other descriptos such as curvature scale space (CSS) and the
Fourier transform. However, calculating Hu’s monuments is
much simpler and faster. In addition, Hu’s monuments are
invariant to scale and rotation, essential for the purpose ex-
plored in this work.
3.3.2 Beans bored by insect
The Hough transform for circle detection (HTC) [42] was
used to detect the holes caused by the insect called
Acanthoscelides obtectus. The HTC is implemented in the
OpenCV image processing library.1 Firstly, a median blur
filter is applied to Igray with a kernel of 3 × 3 pixels aiming
to increase the success of the HTC that is applied in the
sequence.
To avoid problems of noise in the detection of the holes,
maximum and minimum radii are calculated and adopted as
parameters of the HTC. These values are easy to obtain since
the holes have homogeneous sizes, as can be seen in Fig. 6a.
1
https://opencv.org/
Int J Adv Manuf Technol
Fig. 5 Example of broken bean detection
Finally, the holes detected by the proposed approach are
marked on the output image with a red circle, as showed in
Fig. 6b.
3.3.3 Moldy beans
For detecting moldy grains, a convolutional neural network
(CNN) was employed. It was trained using a dataset com-
posed by 5920 subimages (central regions of the grains with
30 × 30 pixels, as showed in Fig. 7) extracted from healthy
and defective grains. This dataset was divided into two parts,
being 4000 subimages for training and the remaining 1920 for
validation of the training.
The CNN employed in this task was implemented using the
YOLOv3 framework [43], specially designed for object de-
tection, which was adjusted in order to receive images of 30 ×
30 pixels in the input layer. The CNN YOLOv3 (You Only
Look Once) is composed by 106 layers, 53 for the backbone,
Fig. 6 Example of bored beans
detection. a Bored beans and b
detected bored beans
(a)
and the other 53 dedicated to the task of object detection. In
the training phase, we adopt 3000 epochs as stop criteria.
4 Developed machine vision system
The proposed MVS is composed of a set of software and
hardware (low-cost equipment) capable of automatically clas-
sifying the most consumed beans in Brazil (Carioca, Mulatto,
and Black) and detecting three of the main defects: broken,
bored by insect, and moldy.
4.1 Software
The software, including the algorithms for segmentation, clas-
sification, and detection of defects, was developed in C/C++
language using the Microsoft Visual Studio 2015 platform
and the OpenCV image processing library. The system inter-
face, illustrated in Fig. 8, was built using tools from the
Microsoft .NET framework platform, which contains re-
sources that facilitate the creation of layouts. We opted for
the C/C++ language because we already had some algorithms
written in this language and also because it will facilitate, in
terms of portability, the execution of the software in different
operating systems.
The command buttons on the interface are divided into
blocks and allow the user to control the motor that moves
the conveyor belt, turn the camera on/off, control the lighting
inside the image acquisition chamber, trigger processing in
offline or online mode, and save images (input image and
images generated in all processing steps). Finally, the process-
ing results are shown in the right side of the interface.
The developed software incorporates the approaches de-
scribed in Section 3, as illustrated in the block diagram
showed in Fig. 9. The first block (acquisition) represents the
capture of the input image by the camera, the second block
(b)

Fig. 7 Examples of images used
for CNN training/validation. a
Moldy grains and b healthy grains
(pre-processing) represents the step of mapping the
foreground/background pixels of the input image using the
built LUT, and the remaining blocks represent the steps of
segmentation, classification, defect detection and displaying
the processing results.
4.2 Hardware
The hardware (Fig. 10) consists of an equipment devel-
oped with low-cost electromechanical materials such as a
table made in structural aluminum that includes an image
acquisition chamber, a conveyor belt controlled by a servo
motor, a feeding mechanism (input box where the grains
to be inspected are spilled), and a box for discharging the
inspected grains.
The equipment was developed to automate the visual qual-
ity inspection of beans, allowing that this process be carried
out continuously (online mode). It was also used to acquire the
images that compose a database used in the offline
experiments.
For the construction of the image acquisition chamber that
is fixed to the equipment, white matte acrylic was employed.
The lighting is produced by LEDs and distributed uniformly
on the lid of the chamber, producing an illuminance of
Fig. 8 Interface of the software that composes the proposed MVS
Int J Adv Manuf Technol
(a)
(b)
approximately 1300 lux, which was established after carrying
out experiments considering different lighting intensities.
Also attached to the lid of the acquisition chamber is a camera
OV2710 CMOS Full-HD - 1080p. This camera is placed at
the distance of 40 cm to the belt, as suggested by [44] and
provides high-resolution images (1920 × 1080 pixels), neces-
sary for inspecting the moldy defect. It is worth mentioning
that for all other approaches the images are resized to 1280 ×
720 pixels, in order to reduce the processing time.
To ensure stability in the image acquisition process,
avoiding possible vibrations of the conveyor belt, an Easy
Servo Motor controlled by an Atmega 328P microcontroller
was employed in the equipment. It provides a precise speed
adjustment and is responsible for controlling the lighting sys-
tem and sending a signal for processing the images when the
equipment is operating in continuous mode.
The total cost of the materials that make up the equipment,
including the employed full-HD camera, was US$1207.26.
5 Experimental setup
For conducting the experiments to evaluate the proposed ap-
proaches for segmentation, classification, and detection of
Int J Adv Manuf Technol

Fig. 9 Sequence of steps

performed by the developed
software

defects, we composed a database containing 270 images
of samples of beans with different mixtures of skin colors
and defects. In this work, we named these experiments as
offline mode.
Fig. 10 Developed equipment
The database is composed of 4 sets named DS1, DS2, DS3,
and DS4, detailed in Table 1. As in [33], for acquisition of the
images, we considered beans from Group I, belonging to 3
classes/subclasses (Carioca, Black, and Mulatto) bought from
different trade brands, being the first two the most consumed
beans in Brazil according to [45]. DS1 and DS2 are composed
of 100 images of 1920 × 1080 pixels each, divided into 10
subsets. The DS3 is composed of 50 images of 1920 × 1080
pixels, divided into 5 subsets. In each subset, the images have
the same quantities of Carioca, Mulatto, and Black beans.
It is important to remember that only the approach for de-
tecting the moldy defect uses the images with resolution of
1920 × 1080 pixels. For all other approaches, the images are
resized to 1280 × 720 pixels, in order to optimize the process-
ing time.
The images from DS1, DS2, and DS3 (available for down-
load at http://www.saraujo.pro.br/beans) were used to
evaluate the segmentation and classification approaches,
while the DS4, detailed in Table 2, was employed to
evaluate the approaches for detection of defects.
To evaluate the proposed MVS (hardware and software),
we conducted experiments in the online mode, in which the
beans contained in a batch are spilled continuously on the
conveyor belt for the MVS to perform the inspection
(counting the number of grains, determining the percentage
of mixture of beans according to their skin colors and the
 Int J Adv Manuf Technol

Table 1 Distribution of beans in DS1, DS2, and DS3

Subset Number of images in each Number of Carioca beans in each Number of Mulatto beans in each Number of Black beans in each
subset image image image

DS1 DS2 DS3 DS1 DS2 DS3 DS1 DS2 DS3 DS1 DS2 DS3

1 10 10 10 100 20 100 0 20 0 0 60 0
2 10 10 10 95 20 95 5 60 5 0 20 0
3 10 10 10 95 60 95 0 20 0 5 20 5
4 10 10 10 90 40 90 5 40 5 5 20 5
5 10 10 10 85 40 85 10 20 10 5 40 5
6 10 10 – 85 20 – 5 40 – 10 40 –
7 10 10 – 80 30 – 10 30 – 10 40 –
8 10 10 – 85 30 – 15 40 – 0 30 –
9 10 10 – 85 40 – 0 30 – 15 30 –
10 10 10 – 70 34 – 15 33 – 15 33 –
Total 100 100 50 870 334 465 65 333 20 65 333 15

quantity of each defect). As well as in [33], we prepared lots 6 Results

(batches) of 1000 grains with different mixtures of beans, as
follows: Lot 1 (930 Carioca and 70 Black beans) and Lot 2
(400 Carioca, 300 Mulatto, and 300 Black beans). In addition,
we considered a lot containing 250 grains (100 healthy, 50
broken, 50 bored, and 50 moldy beans) specially prepared to
test the software in detecting defects. Some videos generated
during the online experiments are available at www.saraujo.
pro.br/beans.
The validation of the results obtained was done manually,
through visual observation of the processed images. As in the
most works presented in Section 2, the success rate was used
to evaluate the performance of the proposed approaches.
However, it is important to note that a direct comparison of
the results obtained by our approaches with the results report-
ed in the works described in Section 2 may not be fair, since
the images from our dataset are different from the images used
in such works (acquired by different equipment, under differ-
ent lighting conditions and with different resolutions). In ad-
dition, none of the works described in Section 2 investigated
the detection of defects in beans. All experiments were per-
formed using a PC Intel Core i7-7500U Quad Core, 2.7 GHz
processors 16GB RAM. This PC was also used to control the
equipment in the online mode.
In this section, the results obtained in the experiments per-
formed in offline and online modes are presented and
discussed. The offline experiments (using the composed data-
base) served to evaluate the developed approaches while the
online experiments aimed at the evaluation of the proposed
MVS (hardware and software).
6.1 Offline experiments
6.1.1 Segmentation and classification
Table 3 shows the success rates and the number of true posi-
tive (TP), false negative (FN), and false positive (FP) cases
obtained in the evaluation of segmentation and classification
approaches using DS1, DS2, and DS3.
Regarding segmentation, the use of the CCG technique to
treat only the regions in which the grains were not correctly
segmented by WT and the heuristics for joining grains pro-
vided good results, both in terms of the average success rate
(99.6%) and time of processing (0.8 s), when compared with
the results obtained by [33] (99.88% and 17 s). In addition, the
success rates (above 99%) obtained by the classification

Table 2 Distribution of defective

grains in DS4 Subset Number of images in Number of Number of Number of Number of
each subset healthy grains broken grains bored grains moldy grains

1 5 100 50 50 0
2 5 100 0 0 30
3 10 100 50 50 30
Total 20 300 100 100 60
Int J Adv Manuf Technol

Table 3 Results obtained by the segmentation and classification approaches in offline mode

Subset Segmentation Classification success rate (%)

TP FN FP Success rate (%)

DS1 DS2 DS3 DS1 DS2 DS3 DS1 DS2 DS3 DS1 DS2 DS3 DS1 DS2 DS3

1 998 999 997 0 1 2 2 0 1 99.8 99.9 99.7 99.5 99.8 99.8

2 997 999 996 1 0 4 2 1 0 99.7 99.9 99.6 99.6 99.7 99.9
3 991 1000 998 3 0 2 6 0 0 99.1 1000 99.8 99.1 99.1 99.4
4 997 995 998 1 0 0 2 5 2 99.7 99.5 99.8 99.3 99.7 99.7
5 998 996 994 1 2 2 1 2 4 99.8 99.6 99.4 98.9 99.8 100
6 999 993 – 0 0 – 1 7 – 99.9 99.3 – 100 99.9 –
7 997 992 – 0 1 – 3 7 – 99.7 99.2 – 99.5 100 –
8 996 997 – 3 1 – 1 2 – 99.6 99.7 – 99.3 99.6 –
9 991 998 – 3 0 – 6 2 – 99.1 99.8 – 98.2 99.1 –
10 997 973 – 2 0 – 1 27 – 99.7 97.3 – 99.4 99.7 –
Total 9961 9942 4983 14 5 10 25 53 7 99.6 99.4 99.7 99.3 99.6 99.8

Table 4 Results obtained by the approaches to detect defective grains in offline mode

Broken beans Bored beans Moldy beans

Grains correctly detected per image Success rate Grains correctly detected per image Success Grains correctly detected per image Success rate
(average) (%) (average) rate (average) (%)
(%)

40 80.0 45 90.0 30 100.0

approach can also be considered a good result. This perfor-
mance combined with the low computational cost of the ap-
proach (0.1 s) corroborates its use in the proposed MVS. The
overall success rate and the time spent by the classification
approach proposed in [33] are 99.99% and 1 s.
6.1.2 Detection of defects
The proposed approaches for detecting broken and bored de-
fects obtained quite satisfactory results. As can be seen in
Table 4 and Fig. 11, these approaches were not able to detect
all the defective grains, as also observed in the other images
used in the experiments. However, they detected 80% of bro-
ken grains and 90% of bored grains.
Regarding the bored defect, in Carioca beans, the detection
is more difficult when compared to Mulatto or Black beans,
due to their color and the existence of streaks that can be
formed by curved lines. In some cases, even for the human
eye it is difficult to detect the holes. The two approaches
together require a computational time of approximately 0.1
s, which corroborates the feasibility to implement them in
the software of the proposed MVS.
With respect to the approach for detection moldy beans, it
achieved an excellent performance with the use of the RNC,
obtaining a success rate of 100% in the experiments. The
average time spent by the RNC to process an image of 1920
× 1080 pixels is 0.2 s, making the total time of 0.3 s to detect
the three defects considered in this work. It is important to
highlight that for identification of the moldy defect, a single
subimage of n × n pixels is extracted from a grain of an image
with resolution 1920 × 1080 pixels, being n the smallest di-
ameter of the segmented grain.
Figure 11 shows part of an image from subset 3 of DS4
with the defects detected. They are labeled as follows: broken
“Br” in blue, bored “Bo” in red, and moldy “Mo” in pink.
6.2 Online experiments
In this mode, the beans contained in a batch are spilled con-
tinuously on the conveyor belt for the MVS to perform the
inspection. Thus, as explained in Section 5, we prepared two
lots of 1000 grains for evaluating the segmentation and clas-
sification approaches. For each lot, three experiments
(inspections) were carried out and the average results obtained
are presented in Table 5.
 Int J Adv Manuf Technol

considered satisfactory, since that in many cases the broken

grains are glued to whole grains, or even to another broken
grain, leading to the occurrence of failures. Regarding the
errors in the detection of bored grains, in many cases even
for human vision, they are difficult to be detected, especially
in Carioca beans for the reasons already explained in
Section 6.1.2. Finally, regarding the detection of moldy
grains, there were cases of defective grains that are confused
with Mulatto grains due to the similarity of their skin colors
and textures. This failure can be made even by a human op-
erator trained to identify bean defects.

6.3 Processing times

Fig. 11 Example of result obtained in the detection of defects
As can be seen in Table 5, the results of segmentation and
classification of grains are lower than those obtained in offline
mode. This occurs mainly due to the decrease in image quality
since the grains are in movement at the moment the image is
acquired and also due to the existence of grains placed on the
borders of two consecutive images that are not processed, as
showed in Fig. 12. The equipment has been adjusted to ac-
quire the images avoiding this last problem, but it is difficult to
prevent it. One way to overcome this problem is in our future
research plans.
Based on Table 5, it is possible to observe that the exper-
iments with segmentation and classification in continuous
mode showed excellent results, in terms of success rates, when
compared with the results obtained in [33] (overall success
rate of 91.33%, including segmentation and classification).
Regarding the detection of defects, we conducted three
experiments with a lot of beans containing 100 healthy, 50
broken, 50 bored, and 50 moldy grains, as described in
Section 5. In these experiments, the MVS was capable to
detect on average 82% of broken, 88% of bored, and 85% of
moldy grains, as shown in Table 6.
Although the percentage of defect detection seems low, the
performance of proposed MVC in online mode can be
The processing times spent by the proposed approaches
showed in Table 7 were extremely important to enable the
development of the MVS presented in this work.
Considering the steps of segmentation, classification, and
detection of defects, each acquired image was processed in
approximately 1.2 s in offline mode and 1.5 s in online mode.
It is important to highlight that the time spent in online mode is
higher due to the larger amount of grains in each processed
image in this mode, which may contain more than 200 grains.
It should be noted that this time could be even shorter using
the parallelism resources provided with the use of GPU
(Graphics Processing Unit). However, this could compromise
the use of the software on embedded platforms, which is one
of our proposals for future work.
6.4 Discussion of the results
Based on the results described in Sections 6.1, 6.2, and 6.3, the
MVS proved to be effective for the tasks of segmentation,
classification, and detection of the main defects (broken,
bored, and moldy) contained in the beans most consumed in
Brazil (Carioca, Mulatto, and Black). It should be noted that
only the classification approach is specific for Brazilian beans.
Obviously, this approach can be easily adapted to classify
other types of beans just retraining the MLP-ANN.

Table 5 Average results obtained by the segmentation and classification approaches in online mode

Lot 1 Lot 2

Number of grains correctly Classification success rate (%) Number of grains correctly Classification success rate (%)
segmented segmented

Carioca 897 920 904 97.5 389 397 410 98.8

Mulatto 9 10 13 – 300 285 290 97.2
Black 71 68 62 95.7 296 287 300 98.1
Total 977 998 979 97.4 985 969 1000 98.1
Int J Adv Manuf Technol

Fig. 12 Two consecutive acquired images in online mode

Table 6 Average results obtained in detection of defects in online mode

Broken beans Bored beans Moldy beans

Grains correctly detected Success rate Grains correctly detected Success rate Grains correctly detected Success rate
(average) (%) (average) (%) (average) (%)

41 82.0 44 88.0 41 85.0

To evaluate the capacity of the equipment in the inspection
of grains, experiments were performed varying the speed of
the conveyor belt, from which was observed that the best
results were obtained with speeds equal to or less than 0.04
m/s. These experiments showed that the higher the speed
employed, the lower the success rates in grain segmentation.
Obviously, if the segmentation fails, the further steps will be
compromised.
Adopting the ideal speed (0.04 m/s), the time window be-
tween the acquisitions of two consecutive images is approxi-
mately 8 s. Thus, in online mode, this is the time that must be
considered to compute the number of images, and, conse-
quently, the amount of grains that can be inspected by the
MVS in an interval of time. Fox example, to inspect 1 kg of
beans (≅ 4000 grains), it is required 160 s.
Regarding segmentation, the proposed approach presented
an excellent result in all aspects, since it obtained the success
rates of 99.6% and 98.5% in offline and online experiments
respectively, requiring 0.8 s to process an image in offline
mode and 1.1 s in online mode, including the pre-processing
step. The classification approach demonstrates a good perfor-
mance, considering the overall success rates (99.6% offline
mode and 97.8% in online mode) and computational cost of
approximately 0.1 s in both modes. The results obtained in the
detection of broken, bored, and moldy beans showed that the
developed approaches are also adequate, since they achieved
overall success rates of 90% and 85%, respectively, in offline
and online modes. In both modes, these approaches require
only 0.1 s to detect broken and bored grains and 0.2 s to detect
moldy grains.
The results obtained by the proposed approaches, in terms
of success rates and computational costs, combined with the
low monetary cost for assembling the equipment demonstrate
the technical and economic feasibility of the proposed MVS.
From the point of view of practical application, the pro-
posed MVS may be more suitable for use in laboratories of

Table 7 Time spent by each proposed approach to process an image in offline and online modes

Approach Processing time (s)

Offline Online

Segmentation 0.8 1.1

Classification 0.1 0.1
Defects detection Broken beans 0.04 0.04
Bored beans 0.06 0.06
Moldy beans 0.2 0.2
Total time spent 1.2 1.5

quality inspection to assist in the processes of visual inspec-
tion of grains. Considering that the analysis of the quality of
Brazilian beans is performed on 250 g of beans, according to
BMALS procedures, the proposed MVS would take approx-
imately 40 s to analyze a sample.
7 Conclusions and future works
In this work, computational approaches for segmentation,
classification, and detection of three of the main defects found
in beans (broken, bored, and moldy) were proposed. From
these approaches, we designed a software that together with
the equipment developed gave rise to the MVS for quality
inspection of beans.
The approaches developed, mainly for segmentation and
detection of defects, represent important scientific contribu-
tions. Regarding segmentation, a fast and robust method was
proposed, capable of spatially localizing the grains in the an-
alyzed image even if they are glued to each other (touching
grains), overcoming existing limitations in many approaches
found in the literature. The defect detection approaches consist
in a novelty, in terms of application. In addition, all ap-
proaches presented in this work are feasible for embedded
systems since they require low computational time.
In the experiments conducted with the image database
(offline), the following success rates were obtained: seg-
mentation = 99.6%, classification = 99.6%, and defect
detection = 90.0% (80.0% for broken, 90.0% for bored,
and 100.0% for moldy grains) with a processing time of
1.2 s. In addition, the experiments in online mode dem-
onstrated the viability of the proposed MVS, since it is
capable of processing an image of 1280 × 720 pixels in an
average time of 1.5 s, with success rates of 98.5% in
segmentation, 97.8% in classification, and equal to or
greater than 82.0% in defect detection. It represents an
important technological contribution considering that to
the best of our knowledge, it is the first MVS (set of
hardware and software) in the literature dedicated to visu-
al inspection of beans.
Finally, our dataset of images can also be considered an
important contribution since it will be publicly available for
download contributing to further researches addressing the
thematic “visual inspection of grains.”
In future work, we intend, in the first place, to solve the
problems and limitations of the proposed approaches men-
tioned throughout the work. In the second place, we intend
to carry out experiments running the developed software on an
embedded platform, such as the Raspberry Pi and, finally,
incorporating new approaches to the MVS making it able to
classify a greater variety of beans, and to detect other defects
and foreign bodies that can be mixed with the grains, such as
pieces of branches and leaves and stones, among others.
Int J Adv Manuf Technol
Funding This work was supported by the FAPESP–São Paulo Research
Foundation (Proc. 2017/05188-9), and by the CNPq–Brazilian National
Research Council (research scholarship granted to S. A. Araújo, Proc.
313765/2019-7).
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