Abstract
Fully automated yield estimation of intact fruits prior to harvesting provides various benefits to farmers. Until now, several studies have been conducted to estimate fruit yield using image-processing technologies. However, most of these techniques require thresholds for features such as color, shape and size. In addition, their performance strongly depends on the thresholds used, although optimal thresholds tend to vary with images. Furthermore, most of these techniques have attempted to detect only mature and immature fruits, although the number of young fruits is more important for the prediction of long-term fluctuations in yield. In this study, we aimed to develop a method to accurately detect individual intact tomato fruits including mature, immature and young fruits on a plant using a conventional RGB digital camera in conjunction with machine learning approaches. The developed method did not require an adjustment of threshold values for fruit detection from each image because image segmentation was conducted based on classification models generated in accordance with the color, shape, texture and size of the images. The results of fruit detection in the test images showed that the developed method achieved a recall of 0.80, while the precision was 0.88. The recall values of mature, immature and young fruits were 1.00, 0.80 and 0.78, respectively.
Highlights
Automated yield estimation of intact fruits before harvesting is an important task in the field of precision agriculture
We aimed to develop a method to accurately detect individual intact tomato fruits including mature, immature and young fruits on plant using a conventional RGB digital camera in conjunction with machine learning approaches, which have been being utilized in a wide range of biological studies [4,6,11,14,15,23,24,25]
This paper proposes an image-processing method to accurately detect individual intact tomato fruits, including mature, immature and young fruits, on plant using a conventional RGB digital camera in conjunction with machine learning approaches
Summary
Automated yield estimation of intact fruits before harvesting is an important task in the field of precision agriculture. Wang et al [1] developed an image-processing crop yield estimation method for apple orchards. They developed two algorithms to detect both red and green apples from images. We could eliminate a great many false positives generated from the pixel-based segmentation process by performing blob-based segmentation
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