Diana Zraková

The production of wooden barrels represents a specific segment of the wood-processing industry with high added value, especially in the aging of wine and spirits. Accurate determination of the internal volume of barrels is crucial for quality control, inventory management, production process optimization, and for the beverages themselves during aging. The aim of this study was to design and test a device that enables the measurement of barrel internal volume using a dry digital method. The device eliminates the disadvantages of traditional measurement methods (wet and calculated) and allows rapid, precise, and contactless volume determination. The prototype was tested on a set of new and used oak barrels of various volumes. The results confirmed high measurement accuracy and significant time savings compared to conventional methods.

Computed tomography (CT) enables non-destructive insight into internal log structure, yet fully automated interpretation of CT images remains limited by inconsistent annotations, boundary ambiguity, and insufficient spatial context in 2D slice-based analysis. These challenges restrict the industrial deployment of deep learning for wood quality assessment. This study applies artificial intelligence (AI) and deep learning to the automated analysis of computed tomography (CT) scans of wood logs for detecting internal qualitative features and segmenting bark. Using convolutional neural networks (CNNs), trained models accurately distinguish healthy and damaged regions and segment bark, including discontinuous parts. We introduce a novel pseudo-spatial representation by merging consecutive slices into red–green–blue (RGB) format, which improves prediction accuracy and model robustness across logs. To enhance interpretability, Gradient-weighted Class Activation Mapping (Grad-CAM) highlights regions contributing most to defect detection, particularly knots. Comprehensive evaluation using Sørensen–Dice similarity coefficients and confusion matrices confirms the effectiveness of the proposed approach under industrial conditions. These findings demonstrate that AI-driven CT image analysis can address key limitations of current log-grading workflows and enable more reliable, objective, and scalable quality assessment for timber-dependent economies.