An automated tomato maturity grading system using transfer learning based AlexNet

Abstract

Tomato maturity classification is the process that classifies the tomatoes based on their maturity by its life cycle. It is green in color when it starts to grow; at its pre-ripening stage, it is Yellow, and when it is ripened, its color is Red. Thus, a tomato maturity classification task can be performed based on the color of tomatoes. Conventional skill-based methods cannot fulfill modern manufacturing management's precise selection criteria in the agriculture sector since they are time-consuming and have poor accuracy. The automatic feature extraction behavior of deep learning networks is most efficient in image classification and recognition tasks. Hence, this paper outlines an automated grading system for tomato maturity classification in terms of colors (Red, Green, Yellow) using the pre-trained network, namely 'AlexNet,' based on Transfer Learning. This study aims to formulate a low-cost solution with the best performance and accuracy for Tomato Maturity Grading. The results are gathered in terms of Accuracy, Loss curves, and confusion matrix. The results showed that the proposed model outperforms the other deep learning and the machine learning (ML) techniques used by researchers for tomato classification tasks in the last few years, obtaining 100% accuracy.