MUSA: a banana database for ripening level determination

Ripening treatment of banana is accomplished globally with controlled ethylene gas, temperature, airflow, humidity and time. During the ripening, the peel colour of banana changes from green to yellow with brown spots. The shelf life of banana has significant quality indices and colour transformations which impacts the banana characteristics like softness, sweet and taste. Therefore, an automatic control system can monitor the ripening level of bananas to maintain the peel colour, firm pulp and texture. Appropriate datasets are required for the experimentation and evaluation of the ripening level determination algorithms. This paper is intended to generate a database for Musa Species (yellow bananas) with different ripening levels such as unripe, ripe and overripe. Rasthali (Musa AAB) and Monthan (Musa ABB) hands are chosen as samples to create the database. MUSA database comprises of 3108 banana images which are acquired at 7 view angles and 12 rotations at a constant illumination. The supremacy of Musa database is tested with the state of art ripening level determination algorithms.