A vision-based color analysis system was developed for rapid estimation of copper content in the secondary copper smelting process. Firstly, cross section images of secondary copper samples were captured by the designed vision system. After the preprocessing and segmenting procedures, the images were selected according to their grayscale standard deviations of pixels and percentages of edge pixels in the luminance component. The selected images were then used to extract the information of the improved color vector angles, from which the copper content estimation model was developed based on the least squares support vector regression (LSSVR) method. For comparison, three additional LSSVR models, namely, only with sample selection, only with improved color vector angle, without sample selection or improved color vector angle, were developed. In addition, two exponential models, namely, with sample selection, without sample selection, were developed. Experimental results indicate that the proposed method is more effective for improving the copper content estimation accuracy, particularly when the sample size is small.
