X-Ray Imaging and General Regression Neural Network (GRNN) for Estimation of Silk Content in Cocoons

This paper proposes a non-destructive technique for silk content estimation in cocoons. The price of a cocoon is determined by the silk content which is determined manually by visual inspection or feeling the toughness of the cocoon shell. The above methods are subjective, non-repeatable and prone to human error. With such non-transparent conventional methods of silk estimation, the buyers and sellers are unhappy over any transaction. Our proposed non-destructive technique uses soft x-ray image analysis technique backed up by soft computing algorithm to estimate silk content. Advance image processing and analysis techniques have been applied to extract morphological features from the x-ray images of the cocoons and features are fed to GRNN to estimate the silk content. Total 594 tasar cocoons have been analyzed with the developed solution and the results have been validated with human experts. Accuracy of the system for silk content estimation has been calculated as more than 85%.