Implementation and characterization of a fibre-optic colour sensor

In this paper the implementation of a fibre-optic sensor for colour detection based on reflective colour sensing is proposed. The sensor consists of three plastic optical fibres emitting red, green and blue components and one optical fibre collecting light reflected from the object. Red, green and blue LEDs are excited at different frequencies. In this way detection of the reflected signal is achieved with only one photodetector and three bandpass filters. Bandpass filters are implemented as digital IIR (infinite impulse response) filters on the microcontroller. Results obtained from the proposed sensor are compared with commercial available colour sensors and the results are satisfactory. Analyses of the sensor performance both in RGB and HSV colour space are done. The proposed solution shows that in specific applications by using the HSV model the sensor can be used both as a colour and distance sensor. (paper)