Automated grading of oleaster fruit using deep learning

The agriculture sector is crucial to many economies, particularly in developing regions, with post-harvest technology emerging as a key growth area. The oleaster, valued for its nutritional and medicinal properties, has traditionally been graded manually based on color and appearance. As global demand rises, there is a growing need for efficient automated grading methods. Therefore, this study aimed to develop a real-time machine vision system for classifying oleaster fruit at various grading velocities. Initially, in the offline phase, a dataset containing video frames of four different quality classes of oleaster, categorized based on the Iranian national standard, was acquired at different linear conveyor belt velocities (ranging from 4.82 to 21.51 cm/s). The Mask R-CNN algorithm was used to segment the extracted frames to obtain the position and boundary of the samples. Experimental results indicated that, with a 100% detection rate and an average instance segmentation accuracy error ranging from 4.17 to 5.79%, the Mask R-CNN algorithm is capable of accurately segmenting all classes of oleaster at all the examined grading velocity levels. The results of the fivefold cross validation indicated that the general YOLOv8x and YOLOv8n models, created using the dataset obtained from all conveyor belt velocity levels, have a similarly reliable classification performance. Therefore, given its simpler architecture and lower processing time requirements, the YOLOv8n model was used to evaluate the grading system in real-time mode. The overall classification accuracy of this model was 92%, with a sensitivity range of 87.10-94.89% for distinguishing different classes of oleaster at a grading velocity of 21.51 cm/s. The results of this study demonstrate the effectiveness of deep learning-based models in developing grading machines for the oleaster fruit.