In order to detect insect-damaged corn kernels affecting the appearance quality and nutritional value of corn,a laser ultrasound-based method was proposed in this paper.Firstly,pulsed laser was used to irradiate the surfaces of intact and insect-damaged corn kernels,generating laser ultrasound signals.Then,time-domain peak factor and pulse factor,frequency-domain centroid frequency and mean frequency,and high-frequency energy in Hilbert domain were extracted as feature parameters from the ultrasound signals.Finally,these five features were used as inputs for particle swarm optimization support vector machine(PSO-SVM)to classify and identify insect-damaged kernels and intact kernels.Experimental results indicated that the classification model established by PSO-SVM algorithm was more accurate for the classification and recognition of maize perfect grains and insect etched grains,and the accuracy of the training set and test set was 99.72%and 98.33%,respectively,and the method a-dopted was feasible.