A Deep Learning Model for Chili Pepper Fruit Shape Classification Using DenseNet-121 and CBAM

Traditional manual grading of fresh chili peppers suffers from inconsistent quality control and low efficiency. To meet the demand for accurate fruit shape recognition during the post-harvest stage, this study proposes an intelligent recognition method based on an improved DenseNet-121 network. This approach facilitates the application of machine vision in agricultural sorting equipment. DenseNet-121 serves as the backbone network. The Convolutional Block Attention Module (CBAM) is introduced to enhance feature focus on fruit shapes. A regularization strategy (Dropout = 0.3, weight decay = 1 × 10^-4) and a cross-entropy loss function with label smoothing (LS = 0.1) are integrated to optimize decision boundaries. These configurations prevent the model from overfitting to hard training labels and yield a robust classification architecture. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed model achieves a precision of 90.09%, a recall of 89.60%, an F1-score (the harmonic mean of precision and recall) of 89.53%, and an overall accuracy of 89.74%. The model contains 7.09 M parameters and requires a single-frame inference time of 7.35 ms. Comprehensive evaluations indicate that the proposed model achieves an optimal balance among environmental noise robustness, prediction accuracy, and computational efficiency. Consequently, by maintaining high fine-grained classification accuracy alongside a low memory footprint and rapid inference speed, the model demonstrates strong potential for real-time deployment on resource-constrained edge devices within actual agricultural optical sorting equipment.