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The authors have approximately 25 years experience in developing machine vision technology for the forest products industry. Based on this experience this paper will attempt to realistically predict what the future holds for this technology. In particular, this paper will attempt to describe some of the benefits this technology will offer, describe how the technology will probably evolve over the short term of three to five years, and address the issues that must be considered when one thinks of incorporating this technology in a plant. The paper will concentrate on the hardwood forest products industry since the automatic defect detection and identification in hardwoods is a more difficult problem than performing the same functions on softwoods. However, much of the discussion will be applicable to both industries. A purpose of this paper is to have this new, infant machine vision technology for the forest products industry avoid the typical "boombust" cycle that many technologies experience when they are first introduced.

Abstract--This paper describes an automatic color sorting system for hardwood edge-glued panel parts. The color sorting system simultaneously examines both faces of a panel part and then determines which face has the "better" color given specified color uniformity and priority defined by management. The real-time color sorting system software and hardware are briefly described. An actual working system has undergone extensive plant testing capable of sorting red-oak panel parts into a number of color classes at plant production speeds. Initial test results show that the system can generate over 91 percent acceptable panels from automatically sorted panel parts. These results exceeded target plant production goals.

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