Abstract: Identification of the tender tea shoots is the key step towards the intelligent tea harvesting. This paper presents several methods to recognize the tender tea shoots for high-quality tea production. Gray images were obtained by five color indices, which were R-B, I, b, S and Cb in RGB, YIQ, Lab, HSI and YCrCb color spaces. Then suitable threshold methods were applied to segment image, finally the median filter was used to eliminate noises. The results indicate that these methods were particularly effective for tender tea shoots identification under their natural conditions. The proposed method can be used for future intelligent tea harvest development.

Key words: high-quality tea, tender tea shoots identification, color indices, threshold segmentation