Abstract: Incompletely closed glumes, germination on panicle and disease are three important factors causing poor seed quality of hybrid rice. To determine how many and which categories should be classified to meet the demand for seed in rice production, the effects of various degrees of incompletely closed glumes, germination on panicle and disease on germination percentage at the harvest and after storage for six months were studied by standard germination percentage test. Six categories of seeds with germ (germinated seeds), severe disease, incompletely closed glumes, spot disease, fine fissure and normal seeds were inspected and then treated separately. Images of the five hybrid rice seed (Jinyou 402, Shanyou 10, Zhongyou 27, Jiayou 99 and Ⅱyou 3207) were acquired with a self-developed machine vision system. Each image could be processed to get the feature values of seed region such as length, width, ratio of length to width, area, solidity and hue. Then all the images of normal seeds were calculated to draw the feature value ranges of each hybrid rice variety. Finally, an image information base that stores typical images and related feature values of each variety was established. This image information base can help us to identify the classification limit of characteristics, and provide the reference of the threshold selection. The management of large numbers of pictures and the addition of new varieties have been supported. The research laid a foundation for extracting image features of hybrid rice seed, which is a key approach to future quality inspection with machine vision.

Key words: image, hybrid rice, seed quality, characteristics, quality inspection, image information base