Tomato Maturity Recognition with Convolutional Transformers

Tomatoes are a major crop worldwide, and accurately classifying their maturity is essential for many agricultural applications, such as harvesting, grading, and quality control. In this paper, the authors propose a novel method for tomato maturity classification using a convolutional transformer. Additionally, this study introduces a new tomato dataset named KUTomaData, explicitly designed to train deep-learning models for tomato segmentation and classification. KUTomaData is a compilation of images sourced from a greenhouse in the UAE, with approximately 1939 images available for training and testing. The dataset is prepared under various lighting conditions, viewing perspectives and employs different mobile camera sensors, thus distinguishing it from existing datasets.The contributions of this paper are threefold:Firstly, the authors propose a novel method for tomato maturity classification using a modular convolutional transformer. Secondly, the authors introduce a new tomato image dataset that contains images of tomatoes at different maturity levels. Lastly, the authors show that the convolutional transformer outperforms state-of-the-art methods for tomato maturity classification.The effectiveness of the proposed framework in handling cluttered and occluded tomato instances was evaluated using two additional public datasets, Laboro Tomato and Rob2Pheno Annotated Tomato, as benchmarks. The evaluation results across these three datasets demonstrate the exceptional performance of our proposed framework, surpassing the state-of-the-art by 58.14%, 65.42%, and 66.39% in terms of mean average precision scores for KUTomaData, Laboro Tomato, and Rob2Pheno Annotated Tomato, respectively.This work can improve tomato harvesting, grading, and quality control efficiency and accuracy.