Enhanced machine vision system for ripe fruit detection based on robotic harvesting

Abstract

The proposed study intends to provide an efficient algorithm for the instruction of an automatic robot arm to choose the ripe fruits on the tree. Steps involved in this study are recognizing and locating the ripe fruits from the leaf and branch portions by using an efficient machine vision algorithm. Initially, discrete wavelet transform is used for better preserving of edges and fine details in the given input image. Then RGB, HSV, L*a*b* and YIQ color spaces were studied to segment the ripe fruits from the surrounding objects. Finally, the results showed that 'I' component of the YIQ color space has the best criterion for recognizing the fruit from the foliage. The fruit segmentation based on machine vision has an occlusion problem. In this proposed method these problems are also examined.