Banana Sub-Family Classification and Quality Prediction using Computer Vision

Abstract: India is the second largest producer of fruits and vegetables in the world, and one of the largest consumers of fruits like Banana, Papaya and Mangoes through retail and ecommerce giants like BigBasket, Grofers and Amazon Fresh. However, adoption of technology in supply chain and retail stores is still low and there is a great potential to adopt computer-vision based technology for identification and classification of fruits. We have chosen banana fruit to build a computer vision based model to carry out the following three use-cases (a) Identify Banana from a given image (b) Determine sub-family or variety of Banana (c) Determine the quality of Banana. Successful execution of these use-cases using computer-vision model would greatly help with overall inventory management automation, quality control, quick and efficient weighing and billing which all are manual labor intensive currently. In this work, we suggest a machine learning pipeline that combines the ideas of CNNs, transfer learning, and data augmentation towards improving Banana fruit sub family and quality image classification. We have built a basic CNN and then went on to tune a MobileNet Banana classification model using a combination of self-curated and publicly-available dataset of 3064 images. The results show an overall 93.4% and 100% accuracy for sub-family/variety and for quality test classifications respectively.