Automated quality inspection of baby corn using image processing and deep learning

The food industry typically relies heavily on manual operations with high proficiency and skills. According to the quality inspection process, a baby corn with black marks or blemishes is considered a defect or unqualified class which should be discarded. Quality inspection and sorting of agricultural products like baby corn are labor-intensive and time-consuming. The main goal of this work is to develop an automated quality inspection framework to differentiate between ‘pass’ and ‘fail’ categories based on baby corn images. A traditional image processing method using a threshold principle is compared with relatively more advanced deep learning models. Particularly, Convolutional neural networks, specific sub-types of deep learning models, were implemented. Thorough experiments on choices of network architectures and their hyperparameters were conducted and compared. A Shapley additive explanations (SHAP) framework was further utilized for network interpretation purposes. The EfficientNetB5 networks with relatively larger input sizes yielded up to 99.06% accuracy as the best performance against 95.28% obtained from traditional image processing. Incorporating a region of interest identification, several model experiments, data application on baby corn images, and the SHAP framework are our main contributions. Our proposed quality inspection system to automatically differentiate baby corn images provides a potential pipeline to further support the agricultural production process.