Abstract To meet the food safety and grain grading requirements, this paper presents a field program able gate array (FPGA) and linear CCD grain rapid detection system design. Selection of linear CCD as the image sensor to collect grain image signal, FPGA timing generation and control the entire system, the A/D signal acquisition processing, and transmission via the serial port to the PC. The results show that the design can achieve grain image information collection, storage, processing and display. The system has a good quality signal acquisition, high reliability, transmission speed advantages, and have good stability and noise immunity, has a wide range of food monitoring applications in high-speed real-time acquisition and processing of grain image data.