Patent ID: 7916949

Claim:
A method of inspecting granular material in a digital image obtained by picking up an image of an imaging region including granular materials to be inspected and digitarizing a pixel value of each pixel of the picked up image, in the case where one massive region is formed of a plurality of material regions corresponding the granular materials which are in contact with each other, for inspecting the granular materials existing in the image region by separating the individual material regions from the massive region comprising: first extraction processing of extracting the massive region as a target region of image processing from the digital image; setting processing of dispersely setting a plurality of reference points along the outline of the target region on an inner side of the target region extracted by the first extraction processing; counting processing of counting the number of other reference points which can be viewed through the target region from individual reference points set by the setting processing; second extraction processing of extracting a reference point giving a minimum count value obtained by the counting processing as a base point from the plurality of reference points in the target region; third extraction processing of selecting all reference points which can be viewed through the target region from the base point extracted by the second extraction processing and extracting a region formed by connecting the selected reference points to the base point as the material region of the granular material; and fourth extraction processing of extracting a region in the target region extracting by the third extraction processing except for the material region as a new target region, wherein by repeatedly performing the second to fourth extraction processing, the number of the extracted base points can be counted as the number of granular materials.