Abstract:Quantitative description of the difference of contours of paraspherical fruits is investigated with fractal dimension with perimeter-area method. Test sample sets are 20 Wenzhou mandarin oranges, 17 Mayang bingtang oranges and 18 red fuji apples. Threshold values of red or blue component of fruit calyx and profile image are used to convert the image to binary image. Red, green and blue components in/out fruit region are set to 0/1. This gets over the shortcoming of Otsu and iterative auto threshold method which has blur boundary and eyelet in fruit region. After boundary thinning, pixel numbers of boundary and fruit region are treated as perimeter and area of fruit region. Fractal dimensions of calyx and profile of three kinds of fruits are calculated with perimeter-area method. Test results show fractal dimension of calyx images is smallest among three kinds of fruits in two directions, and deviation of calyx is not significant between different fruits; fractal dimension variates significantly in profile images. This means the shape feature of paraspherical fruit can be described with fractal dimension especially fractal dimension of profile.