DETECTION OF FRUITS ON NATURAL BACKGROUND

The objective of this research is to detect the papaya fruits on tree in an orchard. The detection of papaya on natural background is difficult because colors of fruits and background such as leaves are similarly green. We cannot separate it from leaves by color information. Therefore, this research will use shape information instead. First, we detect an interested object by detecting its boundary using edge detection technique. However, the edge detection will detect every objects boundary in the image. Therefore, shape description technique will be used to describe which one is the interested object boundary. The good shape description should be invariant in scaling, rotating, and translating. The successful concept is to use Fourier series, which is called "Fourier Descriptors". Elliptic Fourier Descriptors can completely represent any shape, which is selected to describe the shape of papaya. From the edge detection image, it takes a long time to match every boundary directly. The pre-processing task will reduce non-papaya edge to speed up matching time. The deformable template is used to optimize the matching. Then, clustering the similar shapes by the distance between each centroid, papaya can be completely detected from the background.