Waste management using an automatic sorting system for carrot fruit based on image processing technique and improved deep neural networks

Abstract

In this study, we address the problem of classification of carrot fruit in order to manage and control their waste using improved deep neural networks. In this work, we perform a deep study of the problem of carrot classification and show that convolutional neural networks are a straightforward approach to solve the problem. Additionally, we improve the convolutional neural network (CNN) based on learning a pooling function by combining average pooling and max pooling. We experimentally show that the merging operation used increases the accuracy of the carrot classification compared to other merging methods. For this purpose, images of 878 carrot samples in various shapes (regular and irregular) were taken and after the preprocessing operation, they were classified by the improved deep CNN. To compare this method with the other methods, image features were extracted using Histograms of Oriented Gradients (HOG) and Local Binary Pattern (LBP) methods and they were classified by Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP), Gradient Boosting Tree (GBT), and K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN) algorithms. Finally, the method proposed based on the improved CNN algorithm, was compared with other classification algorithms. The results showed 99.43% of accuracy for grading carrot through the CNN by configuring the proposed Batch Normalization (BN)-CNN method based on mixed pooling. Therefore, CNN can be effective in increasing marketability, controlling waste and improving traditional methods used for grading carrot fruit.