Computer Vision-Aided Intelligent Monitoring of Coffee: Towards Sustainable Coffee Production

Coffee which is prepared from the grinded roasted seeds of harvested coffee cherries, is one of the most consumed beverage and traded commodity, globally. To manually monitor the coffee field regularly, and inform about plant and soil health, as well as estimate yield and harvesting time, is labor-intensive, time-consuming and error-prone. Some recent studies have developed sensors for estimating coffee yield at the time of harvest, however a more inclusive and applicable technology to remotely monitor multiple parameters of the field and estimate coffee yield and quality even at pre-harvest stage, was missing. Following precision agriculture approach, we employed machine learning algorithm YOLO, for image processing of coffee plant. In this study, the latest version of the state-of-the-art algorithm YOLOv7 was trained with 324 annotated images followed by its evaluation with 82 unannotated images as test data. Next, as an innovative approach for annotating the training data, we trained K-means models which led to machine-generated color classes of coffee fruit and could thus characterize the informed objects in the image. Finally, we attempted to develop an AI-based handy mobile application which would not only efficiently predict harvest time, estimate coffee yield and quality, but also inform about plant health. Resultantly, the developed model efficiently analyzed the test data with a mean average precision of 0.89. Strikingly, our innovative semi-supervised method with an mean average precision of 0.77 for multi-class mode surpassed the supervised method with mean average precision of only 0.60, leading to faster and more accurate annotation. The mobile application we designed based on the developed code, was named CoffeApp, which possesses multiple features of analyzing fruit from the image taken by phone camera with in field and can thus track fruit ripening in real time

Segmentation and size estimation of tomatoes from sequences of paired images

International audienceIn this paper, we present a complete system to monitor the growth of tomatoes from images acquired in open fields. This is a challenging task because of the severe occlusion and poor contrast in the images. We approximate the tomatoes by spheres in the 3D space, hence by ellipses in the image space. The tomatoes are first identified in the images using a segmentation procedure. Then, the size of the tomatoes is measured from the obtained segmentation and camera parameters. The shape information combined with temporal information, given the limited evolution from an image to the next one, is used throughout the system to increase the robustness with respect to occlusion and poor contrast. The segmentation procedure presented in this paper is an extension of our previous work based on active contours. Here, we present a method to update the position of the tomato by comparing the SIFT descriptors computed at predetermined points in two consecutive images. This leads to a very accurate estimation of the tomato position, from which the entire segmentation procedure benefits. The average error between the automatic and manual segmentations is around 4 % (expressed as the percentage of tomato size) with a good robustness with respect to occlusion (up to 50 %). The size estimation procedure was evaluated by calculating the size of tomatoes under a controlled environment. In this case, the mean percentage error between the actual radius and the estimated size is around 2.35 % with a standard deviation of 1.83 % and is less than 5 % in most (91 %) cases. The complete system was also applied to estimate the size of tomatoes cultivated in open fields