An Assessment of Human Inspection and Deep Learning for Defect Identification in Floral Wreaths

Abstract

Quality assurance through visual inspection plays a pivotal role in agriculture. In recent years, deep learning techniques (DL) have demonstrated promising results in object recognition. Despite this progress, few studies have focused on assessing human visual inspection and DL for defect identification. This study aims to evaluate visual human inspection and the suitability of using DL for defect identification in products of the floriculture industry. We used a sample of defective and correct decorative wreaths to conduct an attribute agreement analysis between inspectors and quality standards. Additionally, we computed the precision, accuracy, and Kappa statistics. For the DL approach, a dataset of wreath images was curated for training and testing the performance of YOLOv4-tiny, YOLOv5, YOLOv8, and ResNet50 models for defect identification. When assessing five classes, inspectors showed an overall precision of 92.4% and an accuracy of 97%, just below the precision of 93.8% obtained using YOLOv8 and YOLOv5 with accuracies of 99.9% and 99.8%, respectively. With a Kappa value of 0.941, our findings reveal an adequate agreement between inspectors and the standard. The results evidence that the models presented a similar performance to humans in terms of precision and accuracy, highlighting the suitability of DL in assisting humans with defect identification in artisanal-made products from floriculture. Therefore, by assisting humans with digital technologies, organizations can embrace the full potential of Industry 4.0, making the inspection process more intelligent and reliable.