Deep Learning for Oil Palm Fruit Ripeness Classification with DenseNet

Oil palm fruit farming is one of the most leading agriculture industries in the South East Asia region. Unfortunately, most of the harvesting method is still done through manual labor. Multiple research has been conducted to help farmers automatically detect the ripeness level of the oil palm fruit. We conducted an experiment of detecting the ripeness level of oil palm fruit by using one of the state-of-the-art computer vision approaches, which was deep learning with a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). The dataset used consists of 7 levels of ripeness with 400 images of oil palm fruits. The models used in this test scenario were both AlexNet and DenseNet. The result of this study showed that DenseNet has been proven to outperform AlexNet by 8.5% in terms of accuracy and 8% in F1 score.