JOURNAL OF COMPUTING, VOLUME 3, ISSUE 5, MAY 2011, ISSN 2151-9617

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Butter Churning Process Automating

Based on Acoustic Signals
Ahmad Aljaafreh

Abstract— This Paper describes a system for automating butter churning process by utilizing digital signal processing techniques based on
the the sound of the churning process. Butter churning is a process to extract butter from the whole milk by mechanical motion. To the best
of our knowledge we are the first who thinks of automating butter churning process based on churning acoustic signature. The argument of
this paper is that sound of the churning varies according to the phase of the whole process. The churning process is divided in this paper into
three phases. The first, is the churning phase, the second is the butter-begin phase, where the butter start coming, and the last phase is the
butter collection phase, where the butter grains is gathered and the churning process ends. This paper characterizes the sound of each
churning phase. A feature vector is extracted from each phase sound based on spectrum distribution. Artificial neural network is used in this
paper as a classifier. Results show that the sound of each phase can be used to characterize the phases of the churning process. The shushing
sound of the butter grains motion is recognized in this paper and can be utilized to automate the churning process. This paper also describes
the design and in implementation of the system using dsPIC digital signal controller.

Index Terms— Butter Churning, Acoustic Signal, Classification, Neural Network, dsPIC.

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1 INTRODUCTION

A butter churn is a device used to make butter by

shaking up the whole milk (or cream). The device
agitates the cream by the mechanical motion, which dis-
rupts the fat in the milk. Butter grains are formed by
breaking down the membranes that surround the fat.
Churning causes these grains to fuse with each other and
form the butter. The liquid that is left out without fat is
called buttermilk. Because of the technological develop-
ment butter churns have varied over time. First, butter
churns were made of animal materials like animal skins.
Later other materials like wood, metal or glass were used
as containers to churn butter. After that electrical centrif-
ugal cream separators were used. Churning process is
still a manual process, where human being makes the
decision when to end the churning process, when the op-
timal quantity or equality of fat or butter milk is collected.
Human being depends on external devices to decide
when to finish the churning process, like the device that
measures the fat density on the buttermilk. This research
has two major objectives, the first is to automate the but-
ter churning process, and the second one is to improve
the churning process efficiency. In this research we sug-
gest a new method to detect the end of the churning pro-
cess based on the sounds that is emitted from the churn-
ing process. We assume that the sound of the churning
varies according to the phase of the whole process. A
shushing noise is heard when the butter comes [1] or
when the cream breaks into butter particles and butter-
milk. When the butter is coming, it is easily ascertained
by the sound [2]. To the best of our knowledge we are the
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 Author is with the Department of Electrical Engineering, Tafila Technical
University, Tafila 66110, Jordan.
first who study automating butter churning process based
on acoustic noise. This motivates us to analyze the sound
of the butter churning. Thus, different churning sounds
are recorded to be analyzed. These sounds are analyzed
to extract and select the best feature vector that discrimi-
nates between the different phases of the churning pro-
cess. After that the ripening time is determined by classi-
fication of the churning sounds, which affects the charac-
teristics of the churning. Effect of physical ripening time
of the cream on churning characteristics is explained in
[5]. This paper proposes a new, cheap, and efficient
method to automate the churning process since automat-
ing food industry improves the production efficiency.
2 FEATURE EXTRACTION
In feature extraction certain transforms or techniques are
used to select and generate the features that represent the
characteristics of the sound signal. This set of features is
called a feature vector. Feature vectors could be generated
in time, frequency, or time \ frequency domain [3]. Fre-
quency based feature generation methods, like Fast Fou-
rier Transform (FFT), are common approaches in acoustic
signature classification. Classification in this paper is
based on frequency domain analysis. The overall spec-
trum distribution is used to extract features, since we as-
sume most of the information of different churning
phase's sounds is represented by spectrum distribution
[3]. In this paper we used the modified variation of the
scheme we developed in [4] for extracting a low dimen-
sion feature vector to obtain good classification results.
The feature extraction technique of acoustic signals in this
paper is based on the low frequency band of the overall
spectrum distribution. The low frequency band is uti-
lized, because most of the frequency components are
harmonics that are based on the angular speed of the but-
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ter churn, mainly less than 500 Hz. Sounds of butter
churning phases are recorded at a rate of 11025 Hz. After
that the sound signal is preprocessed as in the following
sections.
2.1 Time Processing Stage
DC bias removing by subtracting the mean from the time
series sounds
terizes each churning phase sound. The median is used in this paper
because of the noisy environments. Fig.1 displays the acoustic
signals of the three phases of the churning process, while Fig. 2
Shows the spectrogram of the sounds. It also shows the peaks of
the frequencies, it is quite clear that most of the information is in
the low frequency band. For the Unknown utterance, the same
steps are done, except one frame of FFT is considered as the fea-
ture to be classified to reduce the cost of computation, because this
FFT computation is performed on-line. This can be extended to

xi n  = xi n  
 x n 
i (1)
have multiple frames, but this increases the cost of computation.

N
2 ARTIFICIAL NEURAL NETWORK (ANN)
Artificial neural network is a learning intelligent tool used to
solve problem that hard to be modeled analytically. A key feature
of neural networks is the ability to learn from examples of in-
put/ output pairs in a supervised fashion. Artificial neural
networks have been used as a technique for classification.
In our case, there are three classes: class one is the churn
sound, which is the sound of the motion of the cream parti-
cles, the second class is the sound of the coming of the but-
ter, and the third class is the sound of the butter collection,
which is the shushing sound. Multiple sounds are recorded
for each class, and then the 32-length feature vectors are
extracted from all of these sounds. These sets of feature
vectors for all classes are used to train the neural network.
An input of 400 samples of 32 features is used to train, val-
idate, and test the neural network. The targets are three
represent the three phases of the churning process. The 400
samples are randomly divided to 70%, 15%, and 15% for
training, validation, and test respectively. So the network is
trained with 280 samples, validated with 60 samples, and
tested with 60 samples. A three layer network with 10 hid-
den neurons is trained using scaled conjugate gradient
backpropagation. The performance of the neural network is
Fig. 1. Time domain of the three phases sounds shown in Tables 1. The overall correct classification rate is
shown in the last column of the table, which is 98.3%. This
indicates that the feature extraction method is efficient and
2.2 SPECTRUM ANALYSIS can be used to track the churning process phases.

Feature vector will be the median of the magnitude of the STFT of

a signal of event. It will be computed as the following: the magni-
tude of the spectrum is computed by FFT for a hamming window
of size 512, with 128 overlapping.

X i W  = FFT  xi n  (2)

X i W 
X i W  =
 X i W  (3)
Fig. 4. System Layout
After that, the spectrum magnitude is normalized for every frame
as in equ. 3. Where K is the window size. The median of all frames 4 SYSTEM FLOWCHART
is considered as the extracted feature vector.
 
X if W = median X i W    (4) Digital signal controller is used in this system as in Fig. 4
to process the sounds to extract the feature vector and
The first 32 points of the median of the spectrum magnitude con- classify it to one of the three classes. Fig. 5 clarifies the
tain up to 300 Hz. This gives a 32 dimensional vector that charac- principle of work of the system. The system starts work-
ing when the butter churning machine starts working.

© 2011 Journal of Computing Press, NY, USA, ISSN 2151-9617

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Firstly it initializes and starts audio codec driver and flash
memory driver in the dsPIC strater kit as in Fig. 4. After
that the system starts recording the butter churning
sound then extract feature for the sound by using FFT.
FFT computation is implemented by calling “FFTCom-
plexIP ( )” function from Microchip signal processing li-
brary. Then ANN is used to classify the recorded sounds
to one the followings classes:
1. Butter starts class.
2. Butter churns class.
3. Butter collection class.
If the sound is classified to butter start class, the record
and classify process continues. If the sound is classified to
butter churn class record will also continue and a LED
will be set. If the sound is classified to butter collection
class an alarm will sound for class 3 and stop the churn-
ing process.
5 RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
Results in this paper are based on real life butter
churning sounds that are recorded in Agricultural Re-
search Station in Mu'tah University. A microphone is
placed on an electrical butter churn and record the
whole process for several times. Matlab is used to ana-
lyze the sounds. After analysis, the whole process is
divided into three phase: phase 1 is the churn sound,
phase 2 is the butter-coming phase, and phase three is
the collection of the butter and the end of the whole
process. Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) is used for fea-
ture extraction. Fig. 3 shows that each phase sound can
be characterized by its own feature vector. This means
that the frequency components magnitudes vary from
phase to phase. This variation is due to the change of
TABLE 1
CORRECT CLASSIFICATION RATE
Training Validation Test
Correct Clas-
sification 99.50% 98.30% 93.30%
Rate
of the the three phases sounds in Fig. 3.
6 CONCLUSION
This paper proposed a new method to determine the
physical ripening time of the butter churning process
based on the acoustic emission. Digital signal pro-
cessing techniques are used to extract features from the
sounds of the churning phases. The churning sounds
are categorized in this paper to three categories, the
first is the churn, second is the butter-begin, and the
third is the butter-collection phase. Each sound is con-
sidered as a class and artificial neural network is used
as a classifier. An average correct classification rate of
98% is obtained. Acoustic emissions are efficient fea-
tures that can be used for butter churning automating
process.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
All thanks to Agricultural Research Station in Mu'tah
University for providing facilities to record the sounds of
the butter churning process.

Fig. 1. Feature vectors of the three phases sounds

Fig. 1. Spectrogram of the three sound phases

butter grain size. Thus the sound of the phases changes

with time. This changes in sound is clear in the spectrum
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Fig. 5. System Flow Diagram

REFERENCES
[1] http://www.positron.org/food/butter/

[2] http://www.webexhibits.org/butter/
[3] Aljaafreh A, Al-Fuqaha A. Multi-Target Classification Using
Acoustic Signatures in Wireless Sensor Networks: A survey.
Signal Processing: An International Journal (SPIJ), Volume (4):
Issue (4), 2010.
[4] Aljaafreh A, Dong L. An evaluation of feature extraction meth-
ods for vehicle classification based on acoustic signals. Proc.
IEEE International Conference ON Networking, Sensing and
Control (ICNSC), Apr. 2010.
[5] Funahashi H., Horiuchi J. Characteristics of the churning pro-
cess in continuous butter manufacture and modelling using an
artificial neutral network. International Dairy Journal, 2008.