Classification of Individual Castor Seeds Using Digital Imaging and Multivariate Analysis

This paper presents a method based on digital imaging and multivariate analysis for the classification of castor seeds with respect to the cultivar type. For this purpose, two seed groups most commonly employed on Brazilian plantations were evaluated: BRS Nordestina and BRS Paraguacu cultivars (group I) and BRS Energia cultivar and CNPA 2009-7 genotype (group II). Images of these two different seed groups were recorded from a webcam and the frequency distribution of color indexes in the red-green-blue (RGB), hue (H), saturation (S), intensity (I), and grayscale channels were obtained. Pattern recognition methods based on partial least squares-discriminant analysis (PLS-DA) and linear discriminant analysis (LDA) were applied separately to each seed group. The best results were obtained by using the PLS-DA model, which correctly classified 97.5% and 98.8% of the prediction samples for groups I and II, respectively. The proposed method is simple, fast, non-destructive and non-expensive.