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A Classification Algorithm for Date Fruits

Conference Paper · March 2020

DOI: 10.23919/INDIACom49435.2020.9083706

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 Proceedings of the 14th INDIACom; INDIACom-2020; IEEE Conference ID: 49435
2020 7 International Conference on “Computing for Sustainable Global Development”, 12 th - 14th March, 2020
th

Bharati Vidyapeeth's Institute of Computer Applications and Management (BVICAM), New Delhi (INDIA)

A Classification Algorithm for Date Fruits

Adnan Ahmed Abi Sen
Faculty of computer and information
systems, Islamic University
Al-Madinah, SAUDI ARABIA
adnanmnm@hotmail.Com
Nour Mahmoud Bahbouh
Faculty of computer and information
systems, Islamic University
Al-Madinah, SAUDI ARABIA
nour_ita1987@hotmail.com
Ahmad B.Alkhodre
Faculty of computer and information
systems, Islamic University
Al-Madinah, SAUDI ARABIA
aalkhodre@iu.edu.sa

Ashwaq Mohammed Aldhawi Fatmah Ahmad Aldham Manar Ibrahim Aljabri

College of computer and information College of computer and information College of computer and information
systems, Umm Al-Qura University systems, Umm Al-Qura University systems, Umm Al-Qura University
Mecca, SAUDI ARABIA Mecca, SAUDI ARABIA Mecca, SAUDI ARABIA
ashwaq.aldawi@gmail.com dham.f@live.com manar.ibr.aljabri@gmail.com

Abstract— Date fruits are very popular in Saudi Arabia and
around the world. Date fruits have several sizes, colors, taste and
value. There are a lot of challenges facing the date industry. One
of the most significant challenges is the classification and sorting
of dates without any physical measurement. This research
presents comparison among many automatic classification
algorithms with six proposed features mainly relying on (color,
size, and texture). The dataset contains images of four main types
of dates in Saudi Arabia. The results from testing proved the
viability of the selected features of dates according to different
metrics of accuracy, in addition to the confusion matrix. Also, the
results showed that the Support Vector Machine model has
overcome others (Neural Network, Decision Tree, and Random
Forest models), bearing in mind that the used dataset was small.
The accuracy of the Vector Machine was 0.738, while others were
between 0.6 and 0.69. These percentages would be enhanced in
the real environment, if the same camera and same conditions are
available.
Keywords — date fruits; classification; sorting; machine
learning; SVM; decision tree; regression.
I. INTRODUCTION
Computer Vision has proven its predictive capabilities on
an image dataset. It is being used heavily in industrial
applications, including image recognition and detection, image
segmentation, object tracking, and so on [1].
Date fruit are popular in Saudi Arabia and can commonly
be bought from supermarkets around the world. Date fruit has
different sizes, colors, taste and value. The economic market
for the date fruit industry in Saudi Arabia attracts a lot of
attention from the government agencies as well as the private
sector [2], where the share of the Gulf cooperation council in
the total export value of the world was about 25% [3].
There are many challenges that continually confront owners
of date fruit, like sorting the dates and recognizing its aspects,
which can be resolved significantly by using one of the
available machine learning techniques [3].
This research will present a new method to create an
automatic classification and sorting of many types of dates,
especially the popular four types (Ajwa, Mabroom, Sagai and
Sukkary). This method will be based on machine learning
technologies. The used dataset for testing has many images of
the aforementioned four kinds of dates. The main challenges in
this process is that a lot of dates share the same or similar
characteristics externally. Another challenge is the acquisition
of a large dataset of date fruit, which is a decisive factor in the
accuracy of the classification.
This research is constructed as following: after the
introduction, we present the related works. After that the used
proposed features, and classification models will be presented.
Finally, the results and recommendations will be demonstrated.
II. LITERATURE REVIEWS
Due to the importance of date fruits, many studies
discussed the benefits of this fruit [4-5]. Moreover, there are
many studies discussing date fruits and their classification
based on different features, by several methods, and for various
goals [6].
The classification process itself has become one of the most
important functions in many recent applications which use auto
detecting, sorting, predicting, etc. to make our life more
sophisticated, safe, and flexible [7-8].
A case study [9] showed the automatic classification of
dates in smart cities lead to customer satisfied due to deep
learning techniques, in addition to fog and cloud computing
[10-13], other many aspects associated with privacy,
security, and management are discussed in [29-36].
Other studies [6, 14] demonstrated the main steps for image
classifications, then [15] followed these steps based on multi-
features (mean of color for each component: Red, Green, and
Blue, in addition to Standard Deviation). Also, it used area and
perimeter of date beside the Entropy of texture.
In [16], researchers focused on the auto-detection for
infected fruits depending on colors. Other works [17-18] used
A Classification Algorithm for Date Fruits
the neural network to classify dates, determining the level of
quality, or predicting the quantities of production.
Studies [19-20] confirmed that the color, texture, and shape
can provide a high accuracy for classification and can
determine the quantity, quality, and maturity level of dates.
Other research went as far as applying the classification
method based on the internal elements and components of dates
as the level of sugar and rate of fibers [21]. [22-23] studied the
relation between the hardness with moisture based on physical
and chemical properties to analyze the level of quality of fruits.
[24] Also depended the color of dates to classify them. While
[25] used Support Vector Machine (SVM) based on shape,
texture, and color to decision if the date fruit is valid or not.
As some researchers suggested, a harvest robot relies on a
classification algorithm to get the date fruit from palm trees
automatically [26].
In [27] a system is used to classify different types of fruits
based on extract features from images. The features are color
and texture. SVM classifier is used, and the supermarket
products are used as a data set that contains 941 fruit images.
The overall classification accuracy for this system is 95.3%.
Figure 1 shows the system’s stages to classified fruits.
Fig. 1. Diagram for fruits classification system
In [28], the research presents an automatic system to
classify different type of dates based on texture and shape. 800
different images of dates are used as a dataset. Multiclass SVM
was used as a classifier. The best accuracy for this system was
95%. Figure 2 shows the system.
Fig. 2. Diagram for dates classification system
III. PROPOSED SYSTEM
As with most machine learning approaches, there are main
steps from the start to end. The details of our steps were:
A. Step1 – Select the Dataset and Preprocessing
The selected dataset contains four classes, namely: Ajwa,
Mabroom, Sagai and Sukkary, as depicted in Figure 3. The
dataset is not available online, however it can be accessed by
contacting the authors from this URL:
[https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167739X1733056X]
The dataset was not balanced where the number of images
in each class was different (Ajwa:105, Mabroom:92, Sagai:47,
and Sukkary:81). The images of this dataset was not taken by
the same camera and conditions like size, angle, and
background were not maintained. Rather, the images were
searched and collected from Google pics. Thus, more
challenges arose, which were useful to test the robustness of
the classification method.
Fig. 3. Four used classes/types of Dates
To remove bias in the selected dataset, and in the same time
increase the size of it, this research applied resampling
(oversampling) in the data level (such as augmentation), it
selected random items and regenerated new items with some
changes in the size and the angle of images to create new ones.
We split the data into 3 segments: 70% was for training,
20% for testing and 10% of the data was used as validation
data.
Fig. 4. Proposed features of the research
B. Step2 – Extract the Features
The proposed features for the previous methods were:
1- Color: this research used two features related to color
on two sides of date fruit. To increasingly distinguish
 Proceedings of the 13th INDIACom; INDIACom-2019; IEEE Conference ID: 428xx
2019 6 International Conference on “Computing for Sustainable Global Development”, 13th - 15th March, 2019
th

among types, we noted after studying many samples, IV. RESULTS AND COMPARISON
that the Red value of the left point in addition to the This research applied many different metrics for
difference between Blue values of both points gives comparison between the four classifiers (SVM, DT, RF, and
the largest level of variation between the four types of NN). The following tables and figures depict the returned
dates. results.
2- Width of date fruit
3- Height of date fruit A. Support Vector Machines Classifier (SVM)
4- Ratio of width on height
5- Structure: we used the Canny-filter with lower and
higher threshold parameters (50, 100) to find the edges
in the image, then we calculated the ratio of white
pixels to black ones. This ratio determines if the
surface of the dates are smooth or otherwise. B. Decision Tree classifier(DT)

C. Step3 – Select the Classifcation Method

We employed different machine learning methods to
classify dates and then pick the best one; that is the algorithm
which has the highest per-class accuracy. In this way, we will C. Random Forest Classifier (RF)
be able to get a high preforming classifier.
We experimented with the following methods:
1. Support Vector Machines (SVM)
2. Decision Tree Classifier (DT)
3. Random Forest Classifier (RF) D. Neural Network Classifier(NN)
4. Neural Networks (NN)

Previous results clearly show that the SVM has the best
accuracy, then the NN, according to all kinds of dates.

Fig. 5. Proposed Method Steps

D. Step4 – Testing and Resutls

The research used Python for implementation where Python
contains a lot of libraries for machine learning and
classification algorithms. The figure 6 depicts the main part of
Python code which is used for extracting features and applying
classification techniques.
Fig. 6. Python pseudo code for proposed method
Moreover, the confusion matrix confirmed the previous resutls
and the next figures (Figures 7, 8, 9, and 10) present that.
A Classification Algorithm for Date Fruits
Fig. 7. Confusion matrix of SVM
Fig. 8. Confusion matrix of DT
Fig. 9. Confusion matrix of RF
There are 2 interesting things to observe in this experiment.
First is the fact that for the decision tree classifier, the per-class
precision, recall and f1-score for the class name “Sagai” is 0.
That means if we use this algorithm, we will misclassify this
class every time. So, it is not advisable to select the decision
tree algorithm.
Fig. 10. Confusion matrix of NN
The second thing to note is that the performance of the
Neural Networks is lower than SVM. This is due to the fact
that the number of images we have is low. Since the neural
network has a high hunger for data, this low amount of
available data is not allowing the neural network to perform
well.
To summarize, SVM achieved the best result and accuracy
of classification when the number of images in the training data
was small.
V. CONCLUSION
In this research, we proposed six features for date fruits,
then we presented several approaches of machine learning for
classification. It has been observed that the SVM Classifier
outperforms the Neural Networks, Random Forest and the
decision trees classifier. The results produced by our
experiment could be significantly improved by obtaining more
data, since the data was only a few hundred images. Due to
this, the classifiers are not able to achieve optimal performance.
In the future, this reseach can be extended to two new
applications. The first one is the Automatic date separator in
the packaging factories, while the second project is automatic
detection for defected dates. Moreover, it will try to create a
hybrid model that integrates more than one model to enhance
the accuracy of classifcation.
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