Disease and Defect Detection System for Raspberries Based on Convolutional Neural Networks

Raspberries are fruit of great importance for human beings. Their products are segmented by quality. However, estimating raspberry quality is a manual process carried out at the reception of the fruit processing plant, and is thus exposed to factors that could distort the measurement. The agriculture industry has increased the use of deep learning (DL) in computer vision systems. Non-destructive and computer vision equipment and methods are proposed to solve the problem of estimating the quality of raspberries in a tray. To solve the issue of estimating the quality of raspberries in a picking tray, prototype equipment is developed to determine the quality of raspberry trays using computer vision techniques and convolutional neural networks from images captured in the visible RGB spectrum. The Faster R–CNN object-detection algorithm is used, and different pretrained CNN networks are evaluated as a backbone to develop the software for the developed equipment. To avoid imbalance in the dataset, an individual object-detection model is trained and optimized for each detection class. Finally, both hardware and software are effectively integrated. A conceptual test is performed in a real industrial scenario, thus achieving an automatic evaluation of the quality of the raspberry tray, in this way eliminating the intervention of the human expert and eliminating errors involved in visual analysis. Excellent results were obtained in the conceptual test performed, reaching in some cases precision of 100%, reducing the evaluation time per raspberry tray image to 30 s on average, allowing the evaluation of a larger and representative sample of the raspberry batch arriving at the processing plant.