Using Machine Learning to Identify Diseases and Perform Sorting in Apple Fruit

Abstract

Fruit diseases play a major role in global agriculture, leading to substantial crop losses and influencing food production and economic stability. In this age of Industry 4.0 the fruit sorting is an important part in the food processing wherein this work plays a vital role. In this study, a solution for the detection and classification of apple fruit diseases is proposed and experimentally validated. Deep learning models offer promise for automating disease identification using fruit images, but encounter obstacles such as therequirement for extensive training data, computational complexity, and the risk of overfitting. This study introduces an innovative convolutional neural network (CNN) architecture aimed at addressing these challenges by incorporating a reduced number of layers, thus alleviating computational burdens while maintaining performance. Additionally, augmentation techniques such as shift, shear, scaling, zoom, and flipping are employed to diversify the training set without additional image acquisition. Our CNN model is specifically trained to identify common apple crop diseases like Scab, Rot, and Blotch. Rigorous experimental evaluation demonstrates the effectiveness ofour model, achieving a remarkable classification accuracy of 95.37%. Significantly, our model demonstrates reduced storage requirements and faster execution times compared to existing deep CNN architectures, enabling deployment on handheld devices and resource-limited environments. While other CNN models may offer similar accuracy levels, our approach emphasizes efficiency and resource optimization, rendering it practical for real-world applications in agriculture. Furthermore, our CNN model exhibits resilience to environmental variations and imaging parameters, enhancing its applicability across diverse agricultural settings. By leveraging advanced machine learning techniques, the approach developed in this experimental work contributes to modernizing fruits and vegetables sorting operations in food processing, crop management practices thus promoting agricultural sustainability. The scalability and portability of our model make it suitable for deployment in both small-scale farms and large-scale agricultural operations.