Nonlinear Fusion of Multispectral Citrus Fruit Image Data with Information Contents

The main issue of vison-based automatic harvesting manipulators is the difficulty in the correct fruit identification in the images under natural lighting conditions. Mostly, the solution has been based on a linear combination of color components in the multispectral images. However, the results have not reached a satisfactory level. To overcome this issue, this paper proposes a robust nonlinear fusion method to augment the original color image with the synchronized near infrared image. The two images are fused with Daubechies wavelet transform (DWT) in a multiscale decomposition approach. With DWT, the background noises are reduced and the necessary image features are enhanced by fusing the color contrast of the color components and the homogeneity of the near infrared (NIR) component. The resulting fused color image is classified with a C-means algorithm for reconstruction. The performance of the proposed approach is evaluated with the statistical F measure in comparison to some existing methods using linear combinations of color components. The results show that the fusion of information in different spectral components has the advantage of enhancing the image quality, therefore improving the classification accuracy in citrus fruit identification in natural lighting conditions.