Acoustic and video imaging system for quality determination of agricultural products

An apparatus for quality determination of beans, comprising:

• acoustical transducer means for generating a transducer signal indicative of mass and hardness of said beans, said transducer means having a drop tube feeder apparatus coupled to an impact transducer;
• imaging means for synthesizing a digital image representation of said product, said digital image representation including information pertaining to at least one characteristic from the set of bean characteristics consisting of shape, texture, area and color;
• and
• signal processing means for performing a time-domain analysis upon said transducer signal and for analyzing said digital image representation;
• whereby, based on said time-domain analysis and upon said analysis of said digital image representation, degrees of quality are associated with said beans.

A method for determining quality of an agricultural product comprising the steps of:

• dropping said product upon an impact transducer, said transducer being disposed to generate a transducer signal indicative of a set of physical characteristics of said product;
• creating an image of said product;
• digitizing said image so as to create a digital image representation of said product;
• storing said digital image representation in computer memory;
• analyzing said transducer signal and digital image representation in accordance with predefined criteria;
• whereby, based on said analysis, a degree of quality is associated with said agricultural product.