Classification of closed and open shell pistachio nuts using principal component analysis of impact acoustics

An algorithm was developed to separate pistachio nuts with closed-shells from those with open-shells. It was observed that upon impact on a steel plate, nuts with closed-shells emit different sounds than nuts with open-shells. Two feature vectors extracted from the sound signals were melcepstrum coefficients and eigenvalues obtained from the principle component analysis of the autocorrelation matrix of the signals. Classification of a sound signal was done by linearly combining feature vectors from both mel-cepstrum and PCA feature vectors. An important property of the algorithm is that it is easily trainable. During the training phase, sounds of the nuts with closed-shells and open-shells were used to obtain a representative vector of each class. The accuracy of closed-shell nuts was more than 99% on the test set.