Detection of insect damaged wheat kernels by impact acoustics

Insect damaged wheat kernels (IDK) are characterized by a small hole bored into the kernel by insect larvae. This damage decreases flour quality as insect proteins interfere with the bread-making biochemistry and insect fragments are very unsightly. A prototype system was set up to detect IDK by dropping them onto a steel plate and processing the acoustic signal generated when kernels impact the plate. The acoustic signal was processed by three different methods: 1) modeling of the signal in the time domain, 2) computing time domain signal variances in short time windows, and 3), analysis of the frequency spectra magnitudes. Linear discriminant analysis was used to select a subset of features and perform classification. 98% of un-damaged kernels and 84.4% of IDK were correctly classified.