TOMRA Food, Compac and BBC Technologies show new and state-of-the-art sorting solutions at PMA Fresh Summit 2019.

TOMRA Food has a strong presence at PMA this year with a state-of-the-art sorting machine and two innovative new products.

The Produce Marketing Association’s Fresh Summit, held at the Anaheim Convention Center in Orange County, California, is the largest in the Western Hemisphere for the fresh produce and floral industries.

Approximately 19,000 people from more than 60 nations are expected to visit the three-day event (October 17-19).

TOMRA Food is displaying its state-of-the-art TOMRA 5A sorting machine for potato processing. This achieves an unrivalled 98% removal rate of foreign objects, ejecting from the infeed belt unwanted materials such as stones, corn cobs and roots, wood, glass, plastics, golf balls and metals.

Compac is unveiling UltraView, a new inspection module that integrates with the Spectrim cabinet to maximize grading performance.

The only solution of its kind for boosting detection of stem bowl and tip defects in fruit, this will increase line efficiency for various types of fresh produce such as apples, lemons, stone fruit, kiwifruit, and avocados.

BBC Technologies is launching LUCAi™, new artificial intelligence software for grading blueberries which can be easily retrofitted to their KAT0260 for better classifications and more refined sorting. This improves sensitivity to subtle fruit defects, such as dehydration, bruising, and early anthracnose.

Compac launches UltraView, enhancing the market-leading Spectrim grading platform

UltraView is a new inspection module that integrates with the Compac Spectrim cabinet to provide ultimate detection of defects located in the critical stem bowl and tip areas of the fruit – defects that can be difficult to detect due to their shape and location.

The UltraView module contains a dedicated set of high-resolution multi-spectral (color and infrared) cameras and LED lights which are located ideally close to the fruit, parallel to its direction of travel. In this unique position the UltraView cameras generate superior quality images for accurate inspection of the fruit’s stem bowl and tip regions.

The module’s location on the sizer, directly after the Spectrim cabinet, means that the fruit on the carrier is ideally oriented for presentation to the UltraView sensors.

UltraView was field validated in trials run through full pack seasons at sites in the USA and New Zealand.

UltraView reduces the need for manual checking of difficult defects which causes line slowdowns. This results in improved line efficiency and lower packhouse labor requirements, as well as increasing opportunities to adopt tray-filling automation.

Compac’s Spectrim optical sorting platform and Inspectra² near-infrared sorting platform recently won the PwC Commercial Impact Award at the 2019 KiwiNet Awards for the development of worldleading fruit grading and sorting technologies – public recognition of Compac’s commitment to groundbreaking research and development, which has also led to UltraView.

BBC Technologies’ releases LUCAi™, the first artificial intelligence offering to the blueberry industry

By employing the latest powerful software and hardware LUCAi™ artificial intelligence takes blueberry grading to an unprecedented level.

LUCAi™ uses artificial intelligence techniques to classify and grade fruit to precise market demands. The classification is derived from a learning set generated by more than a quarter million individually classified images over the last five years.

And as part of BBC Technologies’ ongoing Berry Science Program, LUCAi™ will continue to increase its knowledge base as more and more variety-specific and seasonal-specific images become available.

As fruit passes along a grading line, each piece of fruit is photographed by multiple cameras. LUCAi™ then identifies and instructs how each individual berry is to be classified. LUCAi™ can process up to 2,400 individual images of fruit each second.

This impressive speed and accuracy are achieved by employing 17,408 graphics processors capable of 304,000,000,000,000 RTX operations per second. LUCAi™ is also able to view fruit in wavelengths not visible to the human eye, further enhancing sorting accuracy.

BBC Technologies has initially made LUCAi™ available as an add-on for its KATO260 optical blueberry grader. LUCAi™ has been validated in packhouses, processing a wide range of blueberries and thousands of tons of fruit at customer locations in Canada, Chile, New Zealand, and the USA.

In these real-world trials LUCAi™ proved easy to use and sensitive to subtle defects in the fruit, such as dehydration, bruising, and early anthracnose.

These advantages help packhouses reduce waste, sell at higher values, and confidently sort fruit which may require a longer shelf life to allow greater travel time to the point-of-sale.