A Study about Learning Graph Representation on Farmhouse Apple Quality Images with Graph Transformer

Abstract

Recently, a convolutional neural network (CNN) based system is being developed to overcome the limitations of human resources in the apple quality classification of farmhouse. However, since convolutional neural networks receive only images of the same size, preprocessing such as sampling may be required, and in the case of oversampling, information loss of the original image such as image quality degradation and blurring occurs. In this paper, in order to minimize the above problem, to generate a image patch based graph of an original image and propose a random walk-based positional encoding method to apply the graph transformer model. The above method continuously learns the position embedding information of patches which don`t have a positional information based on the random walk algorithm, and finds the optimal graph structure by aggregating useful node information through the self-attention technique of graph transformer model. Therefore, it is robust and shows good performance even in a new graph structure of random node order and an arbitrary graph structure according to the location of an object in an image. As a result, when experimented with 5 apple quality datasets, the learning accuracy was higher than other GNN models by a minimum of 1.3% to a maximum of 4.7%, and the number of parameters was 3.59M, which was about 15% less than the 23.52M of the ResNet18 model. Therefore, it shows fast reasoning speed according to the reduction of the amount of computation and proves the effect.