A High performance method for sorting White Paprika

The conical type white paprika is considered as one of the popular culinary plants in Hungary and in the area of Central Europe with Hungarian population, and – as it has spread from here – everywhere in Europe. The classifying of the paprika is carried out through a manual process thereby products with specific classifying sizes characterizing the producers are usually to the market. It is acceptable in the domestic market for time being however, in the case if paprika supplied by different producers (subcontractors) where to be prepared for export, the quality properties are not uniform at all. The sorting of paprika manually requires persons with suitable ability and routine thus the management (organization) of the work comes up against difficulty. The most of the sorting machines is suitable for selecting roundish, sub-spherical vegetables and fruits (tomato, potato, apple, apricot, cantaloupe etc.) by applying the weight measurement. Classifying equipments for carrot and cucumber exist, but the cone-shaped paprika presents some additional problems. The function of the system is to qualify the paprika of which most important parameters are its size and shape – measuring them and processing the measured data have to be solved. The record of shape is realized by CCD photoelectric linear array sensors with the help of which the processing with regular accuracy can be provided. An algorithm running in the micro-controller developed by us provides the assorting process; it determines the size fraction from the length and the shoulder-width, the centre-line length, deformation factor, and the area data.