Vol.3 (2013) No. 1 ISSN: 2088-5334 Towards Sustainable Green Production: Exploring Automated Grading for Oil Palm Fresh Fruit Bunches (FFB) Using Machine Vision and Spectral Analysis Muhammad Makky 1,2 , Peeyush Soni 2 1 Agricultural Engineering, Andalas University, Kampus UNAND Limau Manis, Padang 25163, Indonesia E-mail: muh_makky@yahoo.com 2 Agricultural Systems & Engineering, SERD, Asian Institute of Technology, P.O. Box 4, Klong Luang, Pathumthani 12120, Thailand E-mail: soni@ait.ac.th Abstract— Over the last decade, Indonesian palm oil industry has become a leading producer of the world, and been able to generate notable foreign export reserves. In spite of this, problems still persist in this industry, including low productivity due to mishandling of raw material in post-harvest operations. One of the prime causes of this is manual grading/sorting of fresh fruit bunches, which is prone to error and misjudgement, as well as subjectivity. High demand of oil palm establishes its high price in world market, which drives the industry to expand its plantation area to increase production. Ultimately, it compromise forests and agricultural land, resulting stagnation or decline in several food products. Alternatively, before expanding plantation extent, oil extraction productivity of existing plantation can be improved by carefully selecting appropriate FFBs for post-harvest processing through introduction of automation. The use of machine vision and spectral analysis has shown to assist productivity of agricultural processing industry. This study employs automation technology for FFB grading in oil palm mills, resulting in improved raw material quality, thereby increasing the oil extraction productivity, and simultaneously contributing to partly release the pressure of deforestation by maintaining green agricultural areas. Keywords— Oil Palm FFB; Automation; Grading; Machine Vision; Spectral Analysis I. INTRODUCTION Oil palm industry plays a major role in Indonesian economy and supplies 45% of world’s consumption [1]. Although suffered from various problems, such as heavy taxation from importer countries and occasional sanctions from the European Union and the United States due to environmental and oil palm industry standards related issues, yet the industry remains as strategic importance to Indonesia [2]. The oil palm is edible oil extracted from mesocarp of fruits of oil palm trees (Elaeis guineensis Jacq.). The fruits forms large bunch known as fresh fruits bunch (FFB). The quality of FFB itself can be determined by its condition e.g. ripeness, damage or bruises [3]. The ripeness of FFB is observable through its colour [4]. Over the last three decades, oil palm plantations in Indonesia have growth from a merely thousands of Hectare (Ha) in late 1988 on to more than 9 million Ha [5] in 2012 (Fig. 1).The rapid expansion is made possible through conversion of forest and other agricultural land. However, due to environmental concern as well as implementation of regulation that restrict further land expansion for this industry, a new challenge emerge on how to increase oil production (CPO) with currently available land. Fig. 1 Indonesian oil palm plantation areas, productions and exports [5] This paper attempt to introduce recent engineering solutions to be implemented by the oil palm industry which allow addition of production and revenue using available 1 brought to you by CORE View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk provided by International Journal on Advanced Science, Engineering and Information Technology