Tomato Detection Using Deep Learning for Robotics Application

• Published in: Progress in Artificial Intelligence Vol. 12981; pp. 27 - 38
• Main Authors: Padilha, Tiago Cerveira, Moreira, Germano, Magalhães, Sandro Augusto, dos Santos, Filipe Neves, Cunha, Mário, Oliveira, Miguel
• Format: Book Chapter
• Language: English
• Published: Switzerland Springer International Publishing AG 2021; Springer International Publishing
• Series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science
• Subjects: Agricultural robotics; Computer vision; Fruit detection; Harvesting robotics; Machine learning
• ISBN: 9783030862299; 3030862291
• ISSN: 0302-9743; 1611-3349
• DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-86230-5_3

The importance of agriculture and the production of fruits and vegetables has stood out mainly over the past few years, especially for the benefits for our health. In 2021, in the international year of fruit and vegetables, it is important to encourage innovation and evolution in this area, with the needs surrounding the different processes of the different cultures. This paper compares the performance between two datasets for robotics fruit harvesting using four deep learning object detection models: YOLOv4, SSD ResNet 50, SSD Inception v2, SSD MobileNet v2. This work aims to benchmark the Open Images Dataset v6 (OIDv6) against an acquired dataset inside a tomatoes greenhouse for tomato detection in agricultural environments, using a test dataset with acquired non augmented images. The results highlight the benefit of using self-acquired datasets for the detection of tomatoes because the state-of-the-art datasets, as OIDv6, lack some relevant characteristics of the fruits in the agricultural environment, as the shape and the color. Detections in greenhouses environments differ greatly from the data inside the OIDv6, which has fewer annotations per image and the tomato is generally riped (reddish). Standing out in the use of our tomato dataset, YOLOv4 stood out with a precision of 91%. The tomato dataset was augmented and is publicly available (See https://rdm.inesctec.pt/ and https://rdm.inesctec.pt/dataset/ii-2021-001).