School of Engineering, University of Guelph, Guelph, Ontario, Canada

Dr. Gauri S. Mittal

   Online, non-contact methods were developed for detecting egg cracks and assessing internal egg quality at industrial scale. For internal quality detection, a parallel plate capacitor was designed to measure the difference in capacitance and phase angle at different frequencies between low and high quality eggs. An LC resonant circuit was used. For detection of cracks on the exterior of the egg, an algorithm was developed in Matlab using the Image Processing Toolbox. This algorithm reads in a digital image, identifies and extracts the egg shape from the background, and performs edge detection functions on the resultant extracted image. For edge detections, Sobel and Canny method look for discontinuities in image brightness on the edge surface and return a binary matrix of pixels where 1’s are identified as edges and 0’s are identified as non-edges.

Fig.1 Circuit and set up to measure internal quality of eggs

Fig.2 RGB egg image on left, it’s binary equivalent on the right

Fig.3 Cropped image of egg on purely black background