Quality Evaluation of Tea Leaves During Fermentation Using MRSMRFM

Tea Industries in turn process the tea leaves for exporting the tea production. Quality of the tea is very important. However tea color determination during fermentation is a vital problem in the tea industries. This makes a major contribution of the quality of tea. The human experts since the beginning of the tea industry have been traditionally measuring tea color and flavor to detect the optimum fermenting condition. They use visual inspection and smelling or tasting method which is purely subjective, invasive, time consuming and inexact due to various reasons such as individual variability, adaptation, infection, mental state etc. Chemical analysis is also performed on the tea leaves to determine the fermentation condition. This in turn degrades the quality of the tea. The grading of the tea also differs. Also whenever the leaves are fermented more, they are not used for exporting and hence there is more wastage in the processing. Hence we implement non-destructive testing of tea leaves by using image processing technique. The proposed Multi Resolution Statistical Markov Random Field Matrix (MRSMRFM) method is a combination of first order and second order statistical and spectral features used to test and determine the optimal fermenting condition.