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Yellow berry is an alteration of durum wheat kernels that affects flour quality and, consequently, the quality of products like pasta. The evaluation of yellow berry incidence in durum wheat seed stocks is still entrusted to experts, which make visual analysis of a seed sample extracted from an enormous quantity of vegetal material. This technique is commonly used because of their simplicity and cheapness. Nevertheless, some disadvantages are evident, like evaluation subjectivity and the reduced sample size analysed. Some companies have already realised efficient apparatus for the individuation and selection of extraneous body or altered elements in commercial goods, based on dimensional and colorimetric automatic detection system. These evaluations are performed by dedicated hardware and software and generally they have high costs and low accuracy. Consequently, they cannot satisfy the exigencies of researchers and technicians.

About wheat caryopsis, there are many factors that can affect the automatic analysis, other than the normal variability of the parameters: dimension and position of the alterations, small differences between normal and altered conditions, presence of more varieties of durum wheat in commercial stocks.

The aim of this work was to develop some procedures and methods, based on indices and criteria, to define the characteristics of unaltered durum wheat seeds and to recognise yellow berry visible alteration, using computer vision techniques. In the paper, some information on the possibility to detect and to quantify other seed alterations is also given.