No abstract

Dioscorea hispida (D.hispida) is a poisonous plant which their tuber contains toxic poison and can be consumed after the poison or dioscorine is removed. The tubers were peeled, sliced and soaked in flowing water (river) up to 7 days during traditionally detoxified process. Due to the traditional processing methods for removal of dioscorine is difficult to practice, we develop two types of equipment (wavy and spin) based on their water circulation operations. This project consisted the stages of design, fabricate and testing for the development of stand alone dioscorine removal equipment. Survival of Cyprinus carpio fish in slicing tuber of D.hispida extraction was used as a tool for detection of dioscorine removal. Results indicate that water circulation of spin operation was more effective compared to wavy type based on their capability of increasing pH activity and survival of fish as in D.hispida tuber during 6 hours of detoxified process. Therefore, this unique equipment can reduce the preparation time and also handling process of detoxified D.hispida thus making it to be more hygienic as compared to the traditional method in which river is used as a medium for dioscorine removal. The manual operation for water inlet and outlet for dioscorine removal system will replace for automatic operation by using On / Off solenoid valve while the Peripheral Interface Controller (PIC) is use for controlling input and output signal from sensor, solenoid valve and motor pump. Conceptually, the system will enhance with automatic timer which will pour out the dirty water and refill new water from inlet automatically.

This experiment was conducted to determine the equations relating the Hue digital values of the fruits surface of the oil palm with maturity stage of the fruit in plantation. The FFB images were zoomed and captured using Nikon digital camera, and the calculation of Hue was determined using the highest frequency of the value for R, G, and B color components from histogram analysis software. New procedure in monitoring the image pixel value for oil palm fruit color surface in real-time growth maturity was developed. The estimation of day harvesting prediction was calculated based on developed model of relationships for Hue values with mesocarp oil content. The simulation model is regressed and predicts the day of harvesting or a number of days before harvest of FFB. The result from experimenting on mesocarp oil content can be used for real-time oil content determination of MPOB color meter. The graph to determine the day of harvesting the FFB was presented in this research. The oil was found to start developing in mesocarp fruit at 65 days before fruit at ripe maturity stage of 75% oil to dry mesocarp.

The potential of machine vision application in the determination of alkaloid inDioscorea hispidarhizome was explored. A camera vision system used in this research is chroma meter CR-400 made by Konica Minolta. The first component is the hardware component that functions as an image acquisitioned for the system. The second component is the software part which converts reading obtained from the hardware. From the design review, the images from a variety of harvested ofDioscorea hispidawill be captured and the reading in L*a*b color space were converted. The prediction was also made on the statistical relationship between Hue and dioscorine level in the fruit. With the same rhizomes, 40 grams was selected for chemical analysis at a laboratory for the programme of East Coastal Economic Regions Kementerian Pengajian Tinggi, Universiti Sultan Zainal Abidin, Malaysia (ECER-KPT UniSZA). The samples were selected from 12 portions of 2 plants (I and B) collected from Kampung Kudat, Ajil, Terengganu, Malaysia. The development on this study is grouped as non destructive method to determine the dioscorine content which is one of the alkaloid components in the rhizome ofDioscorea hispida.