An ultimate purpose of this study was to develop an automatic system for brown rice quality inspection using image processing technique. In this study emphasis was put on developing an algorithm for discriminating the brown rice kernels depending on their external quality with a color image processing system equipped with an adaptor magnifying the input image and optical fiber for oblique lightening. Primarily, geometical and optical features of images were analyzed with paddy and the various brown rice kernel samples such as a sound, cracked, peen-transparent, green-opaque, colored, white-opaque and brokens. Secondary, geometrical and optical parameters significant for identifying each rice kernels were screened by a statistical analysis(STEPWISE and DISCRIM procedure, SAS wer. 6) and an algorithm fur on- line discrimination of the rice kernels in static state were developed, and finally its performance was evaluated. The results are summarized as follows. 1) It was ascertained that the cracked kernels can be detected when e incident angle of the oblique light is less than 2$0^{circ}C$ but detectivity was significantly affected by the angle between the direction of the oblique light and the longitudinal axis of the rice kernel and also by the location of the embryo with respect to the oblique light. 2) The most significant Parameters which can discriminate brown rice kernels are area, length and R, B and r values among the several geometrical and optical parameters. 3) Discrimination accuracies of the algorithm were ranged from 90% to 96% for a sound, cracked, colored, broken and unhulled, about 81 % for green-transparent and white-opaque and 75 % for green-opaque, respectively.