Department of Agricultural and Biosystems Engineering

Dr. Tang: System to Find Contaminated Corn Kernels

 

Dr. Lie Tang has been working on an automatic inspection system for corn kernels that can rapidly find bacteria and fungi contamination that is harmful to both humans and animals. The machine uses ultraviolet light to excite the dried and harvested corn kernels to generate fluorescence images for hyperspectral analysis.

The project is called Fluorescence Multispectral and Hyperspectral Imaging for Food and Biological Material Inspection, and is funded by the Institute for Technology Development, MS.

The machine takes images of the kernels as they travel down a conveyor belt in an enclosed box, taking images in 15 different wavelengths to get a comprehensive image of the kernels. The conveyor belt moves slowly and stops at a constant distance interval for the camera to take the images, and an apparatus gently vibrates the kernels so they lay flat and evenly across the belt.

ABE graduate student Jian Jin has helped Dr. Tang on this project, working on algorithms and the applied computational intelligence used in the machine. The project also utilizes image processing techniques to analyze the kernels.

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