Pose-Positioning of Apples

Top-quality apples are packaged in trays where each apple is carefully oriented with its most appealing side facing towards the customer. We develop a system that fully automates this sorting task. The apple is put on a turntable with either stem or calyx facing upwards. While observing the apple during a 360 degree rotation, our machine vision system determines the side with the maximum amount of red color and the orientation of stem and calyx. This process has to be completed within a maximum of one second for the system to be commercially successful.