Tomato Growth Stage Monitoring for Smart Farm Using Deep Transfer Learning with Machine Learning-based Maturity Grading

The tomato farming industry needs to adopt new ideas in applying the technology for its growth monitoring and main. Machine vision and image processing techniques have become useful in the increasing need for quality inspection of fruits, particularly, tomatoes. This paper deals with the design and development of a computer-vision monitoring system to assess the growth of tomato plants in a chamber by detecting the presence of flowers and fruits. The system also provides maturity grading for the tomato fruit. Two pre-trained deep transfer learning models were used in the study for the detection of flowers and fruits, namely, the Regional-based Convolutional Neural Network (R-CNN) and the Single Shot Detector (SDD). Maturity classification of tomato fruits are implemented using the Artificial Neural Network (ANN), K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN), and the Support Vector Machine (SVM). Evaluation results show that for the detection of flowers and fruits, the over-all accuracy of the R-CNN is 1.67% for flower detection and 19.48% for the fruit detection while SSD registered 100% and 95.99% for flower and fruit detection respectively. In the machine learning for maturity grading, SVM produced the training-testing accuracy rate of 97.78%-99.81%, KNN with 93.78%-99.32%, and ANN with 91.33%-99.32%.