A new method of rice moisture content determination using voxel weighting-based from radio tomography images

Abstract

This manuscript presents a new method to monitor and localize the moisture distribution in a rice silo based on tomography images. Because the rice grain is naturally hygroscopic, the stored grains’ quality depends on their level of moisture content. Higher moisture content leads to fibre degradation, making the grains too frail and possibly milled. If the moisture is too low, the grains become brittle and are susceptible to higher breakage. At present, the single-point measurement method is unreliable because the moisture build-up inside the silo might be distributed unevenly. In addition, this method mostly applies gravimetric analysis, which is destructive. Thus, we proposed a radio tomographic imaging (RTI) system to address these problems. Four simulated phantom profiles at different percentages of moisture content were reconstructed using Newton’s One-Step Error Reconstruction and Tikhonov Regularization algorithms. This simulation study utilized the relationship between the maximum voxel weighting of the reconstructed RTI image and the percentage of moisture content. The outcomes demonstrated promising results, in which the weighting voxel linearly increased with the percentage of moisture content, with a correlation coefficient higher than 0.95 was obtained. Therefore, the results support the possibility of using the RTI approach for monitoring and localizing the moisture distribution inside the rice silo.