Volume 10 Issue 1 ( March 2023 )

Rice is the staple food in southern parts of our country. The agricultural sector has become an important income source for our country. Absorption of nutrients provides good health. Hence it becomes very important to preserve the nutrients and use organic fertilizers during rice cultivation. This seems to be a challenging task, due to the lack of implementation of innovative technologies in the agricultural sectors. When the harvested rice grains are polished to increase its appearance vitamin B1 or thiamin is lost and the deficiency of this vitamin causes Beriberi. Due to availability of various rice grains, sorting becomes very important as there are many varieties of rice grains available in the market. Sorting the rice grains cannot be done manually as it is neither feasible nor efficient. Manual sorting is a difficult task and requires more time. Hence, there is a requirement for an automated intelligent and smart rice grain sorting scheme. The proposed scheme has the capacity to recognize and categorize the rice grains based on colour, shape and length automatically. The first step is the collection of rice grain images pertaining to various quality. These images are initially refined by eliminating the noise using median filter. Features are then extracted from these noise free rice grain images. The features include major axis, minor axis, eccentricity, length, breadth, area and intensity. Machine Learning (ML) algorithms are used to train the automated rice sorting system using a computer. The ML algorithms include Black Widow Optimization Algorithm with Mayfly Optimization Algorithm (BWO-MA) categorizes the rice grains into premium and low grades. The rice varieties taken for analysis include Jaya, Budda, Abbilasha, Mugad Siri, MugadSukand and Mugad. Automation in rice grain sorting would support the agricultural sectors to have a great financial upliftment.

Keywords: Median filtering; Improved canny algorithm; Black Widow Optimization Algorithm with Mayfly Optimization Algorithm (BWO-MA); Artificial Neural Networks (ANN), Rice grain sorting.