AI Based Robotic Systems for the quality control of Date Palm Fruits - A Review

Abstract

The date palm fruit has gained significant importance in the global markets in recent years and during the last two decades the global production of dates has become more than doubled. These trends, however, have also made the task of post-harvesting process such as inspection, quality checking, and sorting of the date palm fruits are extremely challenging, as majority of the production units still employ humans to carry out these labor-intensive activities by visual inspection. In recent years, several processing techniques have been proposed by the researchers to address this issue. In this paper, we review these techniques and discuss the need for employing an autonomous robotic system based on the deep learning principle of artificial intelligence together with computer vision techniques. This paper is intended to help the researchers and application developers in gaining insights into the existing post-processing systems and designing even more efficient system of tomorrow.