Abstract
Protected agriculture is a field in which the use of automatic systems is a key factor. In fact, the automatic harvesting of delicate fruit has not yet been perfected. This issue has received a great deal of attention over the last forty years, although no commercial harvesting robots are available at present, mainly due to the complexity and variability of the working environments. In this work we developed a computer vision system (CVS) to automate the detection and localization of fruit in a tomato crop in a typical Mediterranean greenhouse. The tasks to be performed by the system are: (1) the detection of the ripe tomatoes, (2) the location of the ripe tomatoes in the XY coordinates of the image, and (3) the location of the ripe tomatoes’ peduncles in the XY coordinates of the image. Tasks 1 and 2 were performed using a large set of digital image processing tools (enhancement, edge detection, segmentation, and the feature’s description of the tomatoes). Task 3 was carried out using basic trigonometry and numerical and geometrical descriptors. The results are very promising for beef and cluster tomatoes, with the system being able to classify 80.8% and 87.5%, respectively, of fruit with visible peduncles as “collectible”. The average processing time per image for visible ripe and harvested tomatoes was less than 30 ms.
Highlights
Few crops in the world are in such a high demand as the tomato
This paper focused on the automatic detection and location of ripe tomato fruit
Detection of ripe tomatoes: the system detected those ripe tomatoes located in the foreground of the image whose surfaces were not occluded by the plant or the fruit that surround it, or at least, not so much that they could not be collected
Summary
Few crops in the world are in such a high demand as the tomato. It is the most widespread vegetable in the world and the one with the highest economic value. During the 2003–2017 period, world tomato production increased annually from 124 million tons to more than 177 million tons. In the last 15 years, consumption has experienced sustained growth of around 2.5% [1]. These data make the tomato one of the most important vegetables in terms of job creation and wealth, and its future looks every bit as positive. According to data from the FAO [1], even though tomatoes are grown in 169 countries (for both fresh consumption and industrial use), the 10 main producers in 2017
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