A Review on Automated Detection and Assessment of Fruit Damage Using Machine Learning

Automation improves the quality of fruits through quick and accurate detection of pest and disease infections, thus contributing to the country’s economic growth and productivity. Although humans can identify the fruit damage caused by pests and diseases, the methods used are inconsistent, time-consuming, and variable. The surface features of fruits typically observed by consumers who seek their health benefits affect their market value. The issue of pest and disease infections further deteriorates fruits’ quality, becoming a mounting stressor on farmers since they reduce the potential revenue from fruit production, processing, and export. This article reviews various studies on detecting and classifying damages in fruits. Specifically, we review articles where state-of-the-art approaches under segmentation, image processing, machine learning, and deep learning have proved effective in developing automated systems that address hurdles associated with manual methods of assessing damage using visual experiences. This survey reviews thirty-two journal and conference papers from the past thirteen years that were found electronically through Google Scholar, Scopus, IEEE, ScienceDirect, and standard online searches. This survey further presents a detailed discussion of previous research done in the past while emphasizing their strengths and limitations as well as outlining potential future research topics. It also reveals that much as the use of automated detection and classification of fruit damage has yielded promising results in the horticulture industry, more research is still needed with systems required to fully automate the detection and classification processes, especially those that are mobile phone-based towards addressing occlusion challenges.