Recognition of overlapping particles in granular product images using statistics and neural networks

Abstract Image analysis can be used to characterize granular populations in many processes in the food industry or in agricultural engineering. Either global or individual parameters can be extracted from the image. However, granular products may agglomerate on the image, bringing bias measurements of individual parmeters: products which agglomerate have to be recognized. This is done by a combination of image analysis (to pre-process and extract features), statistical methods (to reduce information) and neural network techniques (to take decisions).