Sustainable Yield Prediction in Agricultural Areas Based on Fruit Counting Approach

Abstract

A sustainable yield prediction in agricultural fields is a very critical task that aims to help farmers have an idea about agricultural operations. Generally, we can find a variety of applications proposed for this purpose that include fruit counting. These applications are based on Artificial Intelligence, especially Deep Learning (DL) and Machine Learning (ML) approaches. These approaches give reliable counting accuracy, but the problem is the use of a large database to achieve the desired accuracy. That makes these approaches limited. For this reason, in this work, we propose a low-complexity algorithm that aims to count green and red apples based on our real dataset collected in the Moroccan region, Fes-Meknes. This algorithm allowed us to further increase sustainability in agricultural fields based on yield prediction. The proposed approach was based on HSV conversion and the Hough transform for fruit counting. The algorithm was divided into three blocks based on image acquisition and filtering for the first block. The second block is the conversion to HSV and the detection of fruits. Finally, the counting operation for the third block. Subsequently, we proposed an implementation based on the low-cost Raspberry system and a desktop. The results show that we can reach 15 fps in the case of the Raspberry architecture and 40 fps based on the desktop. Our proposed system can inform agricultural policy by providing accurate and timely information on crop production, which can be used to guide decisions on food supply and distribution.