Classification of Royal Delicious Apples using Hybrid Feature Selection and Feature Weighting Method Based on SVM Classifier

Fruit safety is a critical component of the global economy, particularly within the agricultural sector. There has been a recent surge in the incidence of diseases affecting fruits, leading to economic setbacks in agriculture worldwide. Conventional manual assessment methods are laborious, prompting the exploration of automated computerized techniques for evaluating fruit quality. This research presents a novel method for assessing the quality of golden delicious apples. A dataset comprising 1256 apple images was gathered under controlled conditions. Afterward Feature extraction focuses on texture features like LBP, GLCM, GLDM, DTF, and Gabor features, color features, and shape and size features. A total of 18654 features are extracted and normalized using z-score. A hybrid method for feature selection and weighting involves the mRMR algorithm to eliminate redundant features and the Sine Cosine Optimization Algorithm for feature weighting, enhancing classification performance. The SVM machine learning technique, augmented with optimized features, yielded a 10.53% improvement in accuracy compared to SVM alone. Validation against state-of-the-art methods using Friedman's mean rank test underscored the statistical significance of this approach across various metrics.