The benefit of the machine vision s

The benefit of the machine vision system must financially support the investment that companies are willing to pay. Based upon limited existing labor pools, current congressional reduction in foreign temporary labor supply, fluctuating oyster shellstock availability, and fluctuating but high customer oyster demand, a machine vision system could support a business and allows for high speed shellstock grading. Damar et al. (2004, 2007) used Archimedes principle to measure oyster density and used machine vision to take top view and side view of the raw oyster meat to estimate volume and then use cubic spline to predict weight. Parret al. (1994) developed a raw oyster meat grading and sorting machine. Their machine consisted of a vision system, a conveyor, a microcomputer, and sorting stations where meats were ejected into ontainers. It is capable of sorting oyster meats into 3 sizes with an accuracy of 88% at a rate of 1 every 2 s. Lee et al. (2003) developed a 3-D oyster meat volume measurement method that truly measured the volume instead of estimating oyster volume from 2-D image. None of these existing systems measure oyster shape quality.