ABSTRACT
An air classifier is used in the recycling process of covered electric wire in the recycling factories, in which the covered electric wires are crushed, sieved, and classified by the air classifier, which generates wastes. In these factories, operators manually adjust the air flow rate while checking the wastes discharged from the separator outlet. However, the adjustments are basically done by trial and error, and it is difficult to do them appropriately. In this study, we tried to develop the image processing system that calculates the ratio of copper (Cu) product and polyvinyl chloride (PVC) in the wastes as a substitute for the operator’s eyes. Six colors of PVC (white, gray, green, blue, black, and red) were used in the present work. An image consists of foreground and background. An image’s regions of interest are objects (Cu particles) in its foreground. However, the particles having a color similar to the background color are buried in the background. Using the difference of two color backgrounds, we separated particles and background without dependent of background. The Otsu’ thresholding was employed to choose the threshold to maximize the degree of separation of the particles and background. The ratio of Cu to PVC pixels from mixed image was calculated by linear discriminant analysis. The error of PVC pixels resulted in zero, whereas the error of Cu pixels arose to 4.19%. Comparing the numbers of Cu and PVC pixels within the contour, the minority of the object were corrected to the majority of the object. The error of Cu pixels discriminated as PVC incorrectly became zero percent through this correction.