A computer vision system was built to automatically grade the leaf tobacco. A color image processing algorithm was developed to extract shape, color and texture features. An improved back propagation algorithm in an artificial neural network was applied to grade the Burley type dried leaf tobacco. The success rate of grading in three-grade classification(1, 3, 5) was higher than the rate of grading in six-grade classification(1, 2, 3, 4, 5, off), on the average success rate of both the twenty-five local pixel-set and the sixteen local pixel-set. And, the average grading success rate using both shape and color features was higher than the rate using shape, color and texture features. Thus, the texture feature obtained by the spatial gray level dependence method was found not to be important in grading leaf tobacco. Grading according to the shape, color and texture features obtained by machine vision system seemed to be inadequate for replacing manual grading of Burely type dried leaf tobacco.