As basic research, it has also received increasing attention from people that the “curse of dimensionality” will lead to increase the cost of data storage and computing; it also influences the efficiency and accuracy of dealing with problems. Feature dimensionality reduction as a key link in the process of pattern recognition has become one hot and difficulty spot in the field of pattern recognition, machine learning and data mining. It is one of the most challenging research fields, which has been favored by most of the scholars’ attention. How to implement “low loss” in the process of feature dimension reduction, keep the nature of the original data, find out the best mapping and get the optimal low dimensional data are the keys aims of the research. In this paper, two-dimensionality reduction methods, feature selection and feature extraction, are introduced; the current mainstream dimensionality reduction algorithms are analyzed, including the method for small sample and method based on deep learning. For each algorithm, examples of their application are given and the advantages and disadvantages of these methods are evaluated.

It has been more than 30 years since the French pioneered the research of the apple harvesting robot, and with the joint efforts of scholars all around the world, a variety of prototypes have been developed. However, the existing apple harvesting robot prototype is still in the experimental research stage because of its low harvesting efficiency. With the help of information technology, the related research has ushered in a milestone development, and it is full of opportunities and challenges for apple harvesting robotic researchers. In this article, it briefly introduced the development history, structure, and composition of apple harvesting robots and the operation process, which makes readers have a clear understanding of apple harvesting robot and its harvesting principle. Then systematically summarizing the research results of apple harvesting robots both at domestic and at foreign, we carried out in following three aspects: rapid and accurate recognition and positioning of target fruit, all-weather operation mode, and application of intelligent computing theory in apple harvesting robots, and it analyzes the research progress of apple harvesting robot in detail. The results show that improving the harvesting efficiency is the key and hot spot for the research on apple harvesting robots. Under the impetus of information technology, how to achieve fast and accurate recognition of the fruits of multienvironment and multiple information, obtain reasonable path planning, and further optimization of control strategies are all important research directions.

Surface detection of small defects plays a vital role in manufacturing and has attracted broad interest. It remains challenging primarily due to the small size of the defect relative to the large surface and the rare occurrence of defects. To address this problem, in this article we propose a novel machine vision approach for automatically identifying the tiny flaws that may appear in a single image. First, the presented defect exaggeration approach produces both the flawless image and the corresponding exaggerated version of the defect by taking the variations in the image as regularization terms. Second, a generative adversarial network (GAN) in conjunction with a convolutional neural network (CNN) is proposed to guarantee the accuracy of tiny surface defect detection by producing exaggerated defect image samples. Furthermore, the limited dataset of the training samples for defect detection is enlarged by exploiting the GAN technique with the variation exaggerated images. To evaluate the performance of our proposed method, we conduct comparison experiments between the state-of-the-art techniques with and without the proposed algorithm as well as comparison experiments between the state-of-the-art techniques and our method. The experimental results on different types of surface image samples demonstrate that the proposed method can significantly improve the performance of the state-of-the-art approaches while achieving a defect detection accuracy of 99.2%.

The cucumber fruits have the same color with leaves and their shapes are all long and narrow, which is different from other common fruits, such as apples, tomatoes, and strawberries, etc. Therefore, cucumber fruits are more difficult to be detected by machine vision in greenhouses for special color and shape. A pixel-wise instance segmentation method, mask region-based convolutional neural network (Mask RCNN) of an improved version, is proposed to detect cucumber fruits. Resnet-101 is selected as the backbone of Mask RCNN with feature pyramid network (FPN). To improve the detection precision, region proposal network (RPN) in original Mask RCNN is improved. Logical green (LG) operator is designed to filter non-green background and limit the range of anchor boxes. Besides, the scales and aspect ratios of anchor boxes are also adjusted to fit the size and shape of fruits. Improved Mask RCNN has a better performance on test images. The test results are compared with that of original Mask RCNN, Faster RCNN, you only look once (YOLO) V2 and YOLO V3. The F1 score of improved Mask RCNN in test results reaches 89.47%, which is higher than the other methods. The average elapsed time of improved Mask RCNN is 0.3461 s, which is only lower than the original Mask RCNN. Meanwhile, the mean value and standard deviation of location deviation in improved Mask RCNN are 2.10 pixels and 1.73 pixels respectively, which are lower than the other methods.

The skins of most mature apple fruits are incompletely red and also include green and pale yellow color, which increases the difficulty of fruit detection by machine vision. A detection method based on color and shape features is proposed for this kind of apple fruits. Simple linear iterative clustering (SLIC) is adopted to segment images taken in orchards into super-pixel blocks. The color feature extracted from blocks is used to determine candidate regions, which can filter a large proportion of non-fruit blocks and improve detection precision. Next, Histogram of oriented gradient (HOG) is adopted to describe the shape of fruits, which is applied to detect fruits in candidate regions and locate the position of fruits further. The proposed method were tested by images taken under different illuminations. The average values of Recall, Precision and F1 reach 89.80%, 95.12% and 92.38% respectively. The performance of detecting fruits covered in different levels is also tested. The values of Recall are all more than 85%, which indicates that proposed method can detect a great part of covered fruits. Compared with pedestrian detection method and Faster Region-based Convolutional Neural Network (RCNN), proposed method have best performance and higher than Faster RCNN slightly. However, the proposed method is not robust to noise and its elapsed time of one image is 1.94s and less than Faster RCNN.