Multi-Species Fruit-Load Estimation Using Deep Learning Models

Accurate estimation of fruit quantity is essential for efficient harvest management, storage, transportation, and marketing in the agricultural industry. To address the limited generalizability of single-species models, this study presents a comprehensive deep learning-based framework for multi-spec...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Tae-Woong Yoo, Il-Seok Oh
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: MDPI AG 2025-07-01
Series:AgriEngineering
Subjects:
Online Access:https://www.mdpi.com/2624-7402/7/7/220
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Accurate estimation of fruit quantity is essential for efficient harvest management, storage, transportation, and marketing in the agricultural industry. To address the limited generalizability of single-species models, this study presents a comprehensive deep learning-based framework for multi-species fruit-load estimation, leveraging the MetaFruit dataset, which contains images of five fruit species collected under diverse orchard conditions. Four representative object detection and regression models—YOLOv8, RT-DETR, Faster R-CNN, and a U-Net-based heatmap regression model—were trained and compared as part of the proposed multi-species learning strategy. The models were evaluated on both the internal MetaFruit dataset and two external datasets, NIHS-JBNU and Peach, to assess their generalization performance. Among them, YOLOv8 and the RGBH heatmap regression model achieved F1-scores of 0.7124 and 0.7015, respectively, on the NIHS-JBNU dataset. These results indicate that a deep learning-based multi-species training strategy can significantly enhance the generalizability of fruit-load estimation across diverse field conditions.
ISSN:2624-7402