Fast Fruit identification for Robotic Tomato Picker

Abstract

A novel circle searching algorithm, Chord Reconstruction, was developed to identify andlocate tomatoes in a robotic harvesting system. This algorithm searches circles by first locating thecenters and then determining the radii. The results showed that Chord Reconstruction was lessaccurate than circular Hough transform. However, the mean processing time for each 640480images was 1 second, which was 42.3 times faster than circular Hough transform. The results furtherrevealed that both algorithms were capable of identifying and locating tomatoes that were partiallyoccluded. Linear Hough transform and curvature criterion were implemented to detect obstacles infront of tomatoes. Curvature criterion was more accurate than linear Hough transform because linearHough transform was not able to detect tomato stems, which were not perfectly straight.