Abstract: This article presents an efficient approach to classify a set of corn kernels in contact, which may contain good, or defective kernels along with impurities. The proposed approach consists of two stages, the first one is a next-generation segmentation network, trained by using a set of synthesized images that is applied to divide the given image into a set of individual instances. An ad-hoc lightweight CNN architecture is then proposed to classify each instance into one of three categories (ie good, defective, and impurities). The segmentation network is trained using a strategy that avoids the time-consuming and human-error-prone task of manual data annotation. Regarding the classification stage, the proposed ad-hoc network is designed with only a few sets of layers to result in a lightweight architecture capable of being used in integrated solutions. Experimental results and comparisons with previous approaches showing both the improvement in accuracy and the reduction in time are provided. Finally, the segmentation and classification approach proposed can be easily adapted for use with other cereal types.