Comparison of HSV-color and ANN-HSV-color segmentation for detecting soybean adulteration

Soybeans are an important food crop, but their quality is often compromised by contamination with other materials, a process known as adulteration. Conventional methods for detecting adulteration are slow; therefore, there is a need for rapid and non-invasive alternatives. This study aimed to assess the capability of hue-saturation-value (HSV) color segmentation and its combination with artificial neural networks (ANN) to identify adulteration in soybean samples. This research employed image processing and machine learning to segment soybeans mixed with adulterants at concentrations of 5, 10, 15, 20, and 25. The HSV method successfully distinguished soybeans and other materials, but some challenges were observed in shadow regions and areas with similar colors. The HSV-ANN model with six hidden layers performed well with a calibration accuracy of R² value of 0.97 and root-mean-square error (RMSE) of 2.16, which provided more detailed segmentation, although it still had some problems in shadow regions and undetected corn embryo parts. The validation results indicated that the HSV model had an R² value of 0.98 and RMSE of 4.48, while the HSV-ANN model had an R² value of 0.96 and RMSE of 1.3. Both models were capable of predicting the levels of adulteration, and the HSV-ANN model proved to be more accurate. It is concluded that both methods are efficient; however, there is a need for more work on modeling and sampling to increase the segmentation precision and decrease the biases, especially in the shadow and overlapped color. © 2025, Institute of Advanced Engineering and Science. All rights reserved.