Block-based compressive sensing in deep learning using AlexNet for vegetable classification

Vegetables can be distinguished according to differences in color, shape, and texture. The deep learning convolutional neural network (CNN) method is a technique that can be used to classify types of vegetables for various applications in agriculture. This study proposes a vegetable classification technique that uses the CNN AlexNet model and applies compressive sensing (CS) to reduce computing time and save storage space. In CS, discrete cosine transform (DCT) is applied for the sparsing process, Gaussian distribution for sampling, and orthogonal matching pursuit (OMP) for reconstruction. Simulation results on 600 images for four types of vegetables showed a maximum test accuracy of 98% for the AlexNet method, while the combined block-based CS using the AlexNet method produced a maximum accuracy of 96.66% with a compression ratio of 2×. Our results indicated that AlexNet CNN architecture and block-based CS in AlexNet can classify vegetable images better than previous methods.