A Vision-Based Method Utilizing Deep Convolutional Neural Networks for Fruit Variety Classification in Uncertainty Conditions of Retail Sales

This study proposes a double-track method for the classification of fruit varieties for application in retail sales. The method uses two nine-layer Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) with the same architecture, but different weight matrices. The first network classifies fruits according to images of fruits with a background, and the second network classifies based on images with the ROI (Region Of Interest, a single fruit). The results are aggregated with the proposed values of weights (importance). Consequently, the method returns the predicted class membership with the Certainty Factor (CF). The use of the certainty factor associated with prediction results from the original images and cropped ROIs is the main contribution of this paper. It has been shown that CFs indicate the correctness of the classification result and represent a more reliable measure compared to the probabilities on the CNN outputs. The method is tested with a dataset containing images of six apple varieties. The overall image classification accuracy for this testing dataset is excellent (99.78%). In conclusion, the proposed method is highly successful at recognizing unambiguous, ambiguous, and uncertain classifications, and it can be used in a vision-based sales systems in uncertain conditions and unplanned situations.