FruitProm: Probabilistic Maturity Estimation and Detection of Fruits and Vegetables

TL;DR

This paper introduces FruitProm, a probabilistic model for fruit and vegetable maturity estimation that predicts continuous maturity levels with uncertainty, improving over traditional classification methods for agricultural automation.

Contribution

It proposes a novel probabilistic extension to RT-DETRv2, enabling continuous maturity prediction and uncertainty estimation, enhancing biological plausibility and decision-making in robotic harvesting.

Findings

Achieves 85.6% mAP on a large-scale fruit dataset.

Provides more granular and accurate maturity assessments.

Maintains real-time detection performance.

Abstract

Maturity estimation of fruits and vegetables is a critical task for agricultural automation, directly impacting yield prediction and robotic harvesting. Current deep learning approaches predominantly treat maturity as a discrete classification problem (e.g., unripe, ripe, overripe). This rigid formulation, however, fundamentally conflicts with the continuous nature of the biological ripening process, leading to information loss and ambiguous class boundaries. In this paper, we challenge this paradigm by reframing maturity estimation as a continuous, probabilistic learning task. We propose a novel architectural modification to the state-of-the-art, real-time object detector, RT-DETRv2, by introducing a dedicated probabilistic head. This head enables the model to predict a continuous distribution over the maturity spectrum for each detected object, simultaneously learning the mean maturity state and its associated uncertainty. This uncertainty measure is crucial for downstream decision-making in robotics, providing a confidence score for tasks like selective harvesting. Our model not only provides a far richer and more biologically plausible representation of plant maturity but also maintains exceptional detection performance, achieving a mean Average Precision (mAP) of 85.6\% on a challenging, large-scale fruit dataset. We demonstrate through extensive experiments that our probabilistic approach offers more granular and accurate maturity assessments than its classification-based counterparts, paving the way for more intelligent, uncertainty-aware automated systems in modern agriculture