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Agriculture sector plays a key role in the economic development of India. The task of fruit grading is vital in the agricultural industry because there is a great demand for high quality fruits in the market. However, fruit grading by human is inefficient, labor intensive and prone to error. The automated grading system not only speeds up the time of processing, but also minimizes error. There is a great demand for tomatoes in both local and foreign markets. The tomato fruit is very delicate and hence careful handling of this fruit is required during grading. Thus, this paper proposes an automatic and effective tomato fruit grading system based on computer vision techniques. The proposed quality evaluation method consists of two phases: development of hardware and software. The hardware is developed to capture the image of the tomato and move the fruit to the appropriate bins without manual intervention. The software is developed using image processing techniques to analyze the fruit for defects and ripeness. Experiments were carried out on several images of the tomato fruit. It was observed that the proposed method was successful with 96.47% accuracy in evaluating the quality of the tomato. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]