FruitProM-V2: Robust Probabilistic Maturity Estimation and Detection of Fruits and Vegetables

Fine-grained fruit classification is a critical yet challenging task in agricultural computer vision, primarily hindered by a severe shortage of high-quality datasets and the high visual similarity between classes. To address these challenges, we first constructed a comprehensive dataset comprising 306 fruit categories with 116,233 samples. Moreover, we propose FruitEnsemble, a practical two-stage dynamic inference framework designed to overcome the generalization limitations of static single-model architectures. In the first stage, FruitEnsemble employs a validation-calibrated weighted ensemble of heterogeneous backbones to generate a robust Top-3 candidate pool. To tackle difficult samples, we introduce an expert arbitration mechanism: when ensemble confidence falls below 0.6, a multimodal large language model (MLLM) is triggered to perform rigorous visual verification by integrating external botanical descriptions using Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning. Furthermore, we optimized the training pipeline with a hard sample-aware joint loss. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FruitEnsemble achieves a classification accuracy of 70.49% and outperforms existing state-of-the-art models. Our framework provides an efficient, deployment-oriented solution for real-world agricultural visual sorting and quality inspection tasks.

In this manuscript we release two datasets for visual sensing of tomato plants grown in commercial-like settings and acquired using a robot. The first is BUTom21 which consists of still images and manual annotations. The second is BUTom-ST21 which consists of video-based data and semi-automated annotations through AI-based methods, referred to as pseudo-labels. In both cases, we provide pixel-level labels for the ripeness of the fruit. The aim is to provide the research community a challenging set of real-world imagery to explore methods to sense and estimate the state of tomato plants and their fruit, which is an important horticultural crop. Importantly, the spatial-temporal dataset provides individual fruit count and ripeness information enabling researchers to push the boundaries of field-based phenotyping.

Fruit ripeness prediction (FRP) is a classification-based agricultural computer vision task that has attracted much attention, thanks to its wide-ranging advantages in agriculture field for both pre-harvest and post-harvest management. Accurate and timely FRP can be achieved using machine/deep learning-based hyperspectral image classification techniques. However, challenges including the limited availability of labeled data and the lack of robust methods generalizable to various hyperspectral cameras and fruit types can compromise the effectiveness of hyperspectral image-based FRP. Addressing these challenges, this paper introduces Fruit-HSNet, a machine learning architecture specifically designed for hyperspectral classification of fruit ripeness. Fruit-HSNet incorporates a spatio-spectral feature extraction module based on Fourier Transform and central pixel spectral signature followed by learnable feature fusion and a classifier optimized for ripeness classification. The proposed architecture was evaluated using the DeepHS Fruit dataset, the largest publicly available labeled real-world hyperspectral dataset for predicting fruit ripeness, which includes five different types of fruits-avocado, kiwi, mango, kaki, and papaya-captured with three distinct hyperspectral cameras at various stages of ripeness. Experimental results highlight that Fruit-HSNet substantially outperforms existing deep learning methods, from baseline to state-of-the-art models, with improvements of 12%, achieving a new state-of-the-art overall accuracy of 70.73%.