A Detection Method for Apple Fruits Based on Color and Shape Features

The skins of most mature apple fruits are incompletely red and also include green and pale yellow color, which increases the difficulty of fruit detection by machine vision. A detection method based on color and shape features is proposed for this kind of apple fruits. Simple linear iterative clustering (SLIC) is adapted to segment images taken in orchards into super-pixel blocks. The color feature extracted from blocks is used to determine candidate regions, which can filter a large proportion of non-fruit blocks and improve detection precision. Next, the histogram of oriented gradient (HOG) is adopted to describe the shape of fruits, which is applied to detect fruits in candidate regions and locate the position of fruits further. The proposed method was tested by images taken under different illuminations. The average values of recall, precision, and F1 reach 89.80%, 95.12%, and 92.38% respectively. The performance of detecting fruits covered at different levels is also tested. The values of the recall are all more than 85%, which indicates that proposed method can detect a great part of covered fruits. Compared with pedestrian detection method and faster region-based convolutional neural network (RCNN), the proposed method has the best performance and higher than faster RCNN slightly. However, the proposed method is not robust to noise and its elapsed time of one image is 1.94 s and less than faster RCNN.