No abstract

Rule-based automatic grading (RBAG) of sawn timber is a common type of sorting system used in sawmills, which is intricate to customise for specific customers. This study further develops an automatic grading method to grade sawn timber according to a customer's resulting product quality. A sawmill's automatic sorting system used cameras to scan the 308 planks included in the study. Each plank was split at a planing mill into three boards, each planed, milled, and manually graded as desirable or not. The plank grade was correlated by multivariate partial least squares regression to aggregated variables, created from the sorting system's measurements at the sawmill. Grading models were trained and tested independently using 5-fold cross-validation to evaluate the grading accuracy of the holistic-subjective automatic grading (HSAG), and compared with a resubstitution test. Results showed that using the HSAG method at the sawmill graded on average 74% of planks correctly, while 83% of desirable planks were correctly identified. Results implied that a sawmill sorting station could grade planks according to a customer's product quality grade with similar accuracy to HSAG conforming with manual grading of standardised sorting classes, even when the customer is processing the planks further.

Computed tomography (CT) scanning of logs makes appearance-grading virtual sawn timber possible before the log is sawn. A CT-scanner can measure the knot structure inside a scanned log, inferring how to saw the log. The knot structure of virtual sawn timber was graded as being suitable or not for a specific product by the existing rule-based approach and used to create a set of descriptive statistical variables used by two machine learning models. The PLS models were trained on two quality references; the quality grade of the finished product or the image-grade based on images of the sawn timber, extracted from the dry-sorting station's automatic grading system and graded by two experienced researchers. The results show that the two PLS models perform equally well when sorting sawn timber to the customer, indicating that the quality references are equally useful for training a PLS model. The PLS models both delivered 93% of the dried sawn timber to the customer, leaving very little sawn timber with customer-specific properties at the sawmill, of which 89% and 90% of the delivered sawn timber passed the intended product's quality demands. The rule-based approach delivered 85% dried sawn timber with a 73% pass rate.

Using multivariate partial least squares regression (PLS) to perform visual quality grading of sawn timber requires a training set with known quality grades for the training of a grading model. This study evaluated the grading accuracy of an independent test set of sawn timber when changing the aspects of classbalance and class-overlap of the training set consisting of 251 planks. The study also compared two ways of expressing the reference-grade of the training set; by grading images picturing the planks, and by grading the product produced from the planks. Two grading models were trained using each reference-grade to establish a baseline for comparison. Both models achieved a 76% grading accuracy of the test set, indicating that both reference-grades can be used to train comparable models. To study the class-balance and class-overlap aspects of the training set, 25% of the training set was removed in two training scenarios. The models trained on class-balanced data indicated that classimbalance of the training set was not a problem. The models trained on data with less class-overlap using the product-grade reference suffered a 4%-points grading accuracy loss due to the smaller training set, while the model trained using the image-grade reference retained its grading accuracy.