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Correlation between oil content and DN values Materials and Methods Fruitlets sampling is carried out because oil palm fruits have different ripeness stage. The oil palm fruits can be ripe, unripe, overripe, black bunch or empty bunch. For this study we used 3 categories of oil palm fruits, which are known as ripe, unripe and over ripe because this ensures a good cross- selection across the board (Table 1). A Nikon macro-lens camera was used to acquire image of these fruitlets. A total of 30 samples, made up 10 samples each of ripe, over ripe and under ripe fruitlets ( Fig. 1, 2 and 3 ). Then images of these fruitlets were captured in a room with a proper control environment such as lighting, distance and height from camera to object. The setting of this image acquisition system is shown in Fig. 4. This study involved hardware system in order to capture an image, process the data, display the image and to do statistical analysis. The main hardware system in this study is the camera to grab the image of the sample oil palm fruits. The camera used in this study is the Nikon CCD RGB Single Chip and the computer system to do image processing and statistical data analysis is the Intel Pentium III processor, 64 MB RAM. The pictures were scanned to convert them into digital form using a scanner with 400 dpi optical resolution. PCI 7.0 application software was used for the digital image processing and analysis. Operating system used was Window 98 system. PCI 7.0 software is capable of image displaying, enhancement, manipulation and restoration. Information that is extracted in this study is the color value based on the RGB color model. The image processing is done to see the relationship of the color with oil content of oil palm fruit. By using PCI software we can see each band (Red, Green and Blue’s color in the 3 types of fruits with different ripeness.) Then for each of these colors we get the Digital Number (DN) for each band. The information is used to plot the histogram of each band for each type of fruit (Fig. 5 (a), (b), (c)). In order to investigate the correlation between color properties with oil content, chemical processing was carried out to determine the oil content for every sample. In doing this analysis, lab processing is done immediately after the image of the oil palm fruits is grabbed using camera. This is because the oil content might change if we process the samples later than one week. Formula to measure the oil content is shown below:- % Oil = Wt of Oil X 100% Wt sample (1) Where: Wt oil = weight of oil Wt sample = weight of sample  Fig 4: Image Acquisition Setting The oil content that has been extracted using this chemical processing is determined as a percentage (%) of the weight of the sample. This analysis is repeated until the entire sample is done. From these results, we can correlate the oil content values by comparing against the color values of the three types of fruits that were used.
 Fig 5(a): RGB for Ripe Fruit Sample |