Tomato maturity grading is quite essential in commercial farms that produce large quantities of tomatoes, and human graders usually perform tomato maturity grading. This task is carried out by matching the surface color of tomatoes to the United States Department of Agriculture's (USDA) tomato color chart which shows six maturity stages: Green, Breakers, Turning, Pink, Light Red, and Red. However, due to some uncontrollable factors, manual classification involving human graders is prone to misclassification. Thus, this paper introduces an automated tomato classification system that uses Artificial Neural Network (ANN) classifier trained using the Artificial Bee Colony (ABC) algorithm. To effectively classify tomatoes, the researchers combined five color features (Red, Green, Red-Green, Hue, a*) from three color models (RGB, HSI, CIE L*a*b*). These features are the inputs to the ANN classifier. Experiment results show that the ABC-trained ANN classifiers performed well in tomato classification and achieved high accuracy rate. Also, results show that combining the color features from different color models produce better accuracy rate than using color features from a single color model. With these results, an automated tomato classification system using an ABC-trained ANN classifier can be used to replace the manual classification procedure as it minimizes the chances of misclassification.Keywords: Tomato Grading, Artificial Bee Colony Algorithm, ABC, Artificial Neural Networks, Image Processing
INTRODUCTIONTomato, Lycopersicon esculentum, is one of the most important and popular fruits in the world that can be consumed in several ways, for instance, as an ingredient in many dishes, sauces, and drinks. It has several varieties, which differ in shape, size, and color. Tomato maturity is commonly determined by its surface color because it is the most observable characteristic in estimating tomato maturity or ripeness, and most consumers buy tomatoes based only on the surface color. Hence, the color of the tomato is a major factor in determining the appropriate time to market the product since it influences consumers' preference [1,2,3].Fruits such as tomatoes are sorted and classified into several classes before being transported to commercial establishments for public consumption. This task is manually done using human labor. Farmers (human graders) in most commercial farms classify tomato maturity by comparing its surface color to the USDA color chart. The United States Department of Agriculture designed a color chart as a standard for tomato classification, and according to this chart, tomato ripeness is divided into six maturity stages: Green stage, Breakers stage, Turning stage, Pink stage, Light Red stage, and Red stage [1,4,5,7,8,17].However, the traditional way of tomato ripeness classification is very tiring and prone to error. Human graders can suffer from visual fatigue and stress that may affect the quality of grading. Also, human grading may vary from one person to another [3]. Because of these ...