Abstract:
Tea (Camellia Sinensis) is among the most popular crops worldwide.
The crop has been cultivated for more than 300 years and is a source of various
categories of tea which include: green, black, yellow, white Oolong, ilex,
among others. Among these categories of tea, black tea is the most popular with
an estimated consumption of 78% of the total tea consumptions. The steps of
processing black tea are: plucking, withering, cutting, tearing and curling, fer-
mentation, drying and sorting and packaging. Monitoring tea processing has
been an area of interest to researchers for more than 50 years with proposals be-
ing put forward on various ways of professionalizing one or more of the steps
of tea processing. Some of the proposals being put forward are in the use of:
Machine Vision, Internet of Things (IoT), Electronic Nose and Electronic
Tongue, among others. This paper reviews some of the technological proposals
to monitor tea processing and proposes future directions