Automated image identification, detection and fruit counting of top-view pineapple crown using machine learning

Automated fruit identification or recognition using image processing is a key element in precision agriculture for performing object detection in large crop plots. Automation of fruit recognition for the captured top-view of RGB based images using an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) is a challenge. Image analysis demonstrated the difficulty of processing the captured image under variant illumination in natural environment and with textured objects of non-ideal geometric shapes. However, this is subjected to certain consideration settings and image-processing algorithms. The study presents an automatic method for identifying and recognising the pineapple’s crown images in the designated plot using image processing and further counts the detected images using machine learning classifiers namely artificial neural network (ANN), support vector machine (SVM), random forest (RF), naive Bayes (NB), decision trees (DT) and k-nearest neighbours (KNN). The high spatial-resolution aerial images were pre-processed and segmented, and its extracted features were analysed according to shape, colour and texture for recognising the pineapple crown before classifying it as fruit or non-fruit. Feature fusion using one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) was incorporated in this study to optimise the performance of machine learning classifier. The algorithm was quantitatively analysed and validated for performance via accuracy, specificity, sensitivity and precision. The detection for the pineapple’s crown images with ANN-GDX classification has demonstrated best performance fruit counting with accuracy of 94.4% and has thus demonstrated clear potential application of an effective RGB images analysis for the pineapple industry.