Estimation of tomato maturity as a continuous index using deep neural networks

In this study, tomato maturity was estimated based on deep learning for a harvesting robot. Tomato images were obtained using a RGB camera installed on a monitoring robot, which was developed previously, and the samples were cropped to 128 × 128 size images to generate a dataset for training the classification model. The classification model was constructed based on convolutional neural networks, and the mean-variance loss was used to learn implicitly the distribution of the data features by class. In the test stage, the tomato maturity was estimated as a continuous index, which has a range of 0 to 1, by calculating the expected class value. The results show that the F1-score of the classification was approximately 0.94, and the performance was similar to that of a deep learning-based classification task in the agriculture field. In addition, it was possible to estimate the distribution in each maturity stage. From the results, it was found that our approach can not only classify the discrete maturation stages of the tomatoes but also can estimate the continuous maturity.