Detection and counting of immature green citrus fruit based on the Local Binary Patterns (LBP) feature using illumination-normalized images

Early detection and counting of immature green citrus fruit using computer vision can help growers produce a predictive yield map which could be used to adjust management practices during the fruit maturing stages. However, such detecting and counting is difficult because of varying illumination, random occlusion and color similarity with leaves. An immature fruit detection algorithm was developed with the aim of identifying and counting fruit in a citrus grove under varying illumination environments and random occlusions using images acquired by a regular red–green–blue (RGB) color camera. Acquired citrus images included front-lighting and back-lighting illumination conditions. The Retinex image enhancement algorithm and the two-dimensional discrete wavelet transform were used for image illumination normalization. Color-based K-means clustering and circular hough transform (CHT) were applied in order to detect potential fruit regions. A Local Binary Patterns feature-based Adaptive Boosting (AdaBoost) classifier was built for removing false positives. A sub-window was used to scan the difference image between the illumination-normalized image and the resulting image from CHT detection in order to detect small areas and partially occluded fruit. An overall accuracy of 85.6% was achieved for the validation set which showed promising potential for the proposed method.