Abstract: To replace low efficiency manual tobacco leaf preprocessing prior to threshing and redrying process, an automatic tobacco leaf separation and aligning system was designed. The system consists of a splitting device, a loosening and separation device and an aligning device. After unpacking, tobacco stack is transported by an AGV to the splitting device, where the tobacco stack is divided into a number of layered tobacco blocks; then the loosening and separation device further separates the layered tobacco blocks into individual tobacco leaves; finally, the aligning device adjust the orientation of the individual tobacco leaves to the same direction longitudinally. The system was tested with 2022 C3F tobacco leaves from Youxi, Longyan provided by Fujian Longyan Jinye Redrying Corporation Limited. The results showed that compared with manual separation, the designed system reduced tobacco loss by about 33.5% and the tobacco dust reduced by about 27.2%. The system achieves good results for sticky leaves, more than 94% leaves are fully separated. Leaf orientation alignment ensures about 80% of the leaves to be transported in the longitudinal direction, it benefits to subsequent intelligent grading and sorting operations. This technology supports the improvement of intelligent tobacco grading and automated production.