Color sorting of lumber

Abstract From the Canadian patent

A system for sorting lumber using a scanning camera that generates separate red, green and in some cases blue outputs to scan selected length increments along the surface of a piece of lumber and such data collected for each color is each separately histogrammed to produce a frequency distribution of color intensity. The data is analyzed to determine the mean values for each color in the selected lengths and the lengths characterized based on these mean values into specific colors. The lumber pieces may be automatically severed into pieces having significant differences in color and the pieces of significantly different colors may be automatically collected in different groupings. In an …