Deep learning has become a widely used powerful tool in many research fields, although not much so yet in agriculture technologies. In this work, two deep convolutional neural networks (CNN), viz. Residual Network (ResNet) and its improved version named ResNeXt, are used to detect internal mechanical damage of blueberries using hyperspectral transmittance data. The original structure and size of hypercubes are adapted for the deep CNN training. To ensure that the models are applicable to hypercube, we adjust the number of filters in the convolutional layers. Moreover, a total of 5 traditional machine learning algorithms, viz. Sequential Minimal Optimization (SMO), Linear Regression (LR), Random Forest (RF), Bagging and Multilayer Perceptron (MLP), are performed as the comparison experiments. In terms of model assessment, k-fold cross validation is used to indicate that the model performance does not vary with the different combination of dataset. In real-world application, selling damaged berries will lead to greater interest loss than discarding the sound ones. Thus, precision, recall, and F1-score are also used as the evaluation indicators alongside accuracy to quantify the false positive rate. The first three indicators are seldom used by investigators in the agricultural engineering domain. Furthermore, ROC curves and Precision-Recall curves are plotted to visualize the performance of classifiers. The fine-tuned ResNet/ResNeXt achieve average accuracy and F1-score of 0.8844/0.8784 and 0.8952/0.8905, respectively. Classifiers SMO/ LR/RF/Bagging/MLP obtain average accuracy and F1-score of 0.8082/0.7606/0.7314/0.7113/0.7827 and 0.8268/0.7796/0.7529/0.7339/0.7971, respectively. Two deep learning models achieve better classification performance than the traditional machine learning methods. Classification for each testing sample only takes 5.2 ms and 6.5 ms respectively for ResNet and ResNeXt, indicating that the deep learning framework has great potential for online fruit sorting. The results of this study demonstrate the potential of deep CNN application on analyzing the internal mechanical damage of fruit.

The purpose of this study is to analyze how detected objects affect the noise distribution of THz security images. Noise in THz image caused by hardware deteriorates the image quality seriously, limiting the application. In addition, there are few papers on the noise analysis of THz screenings. Due to the special attributes of the THz image compared to the natural image, an alpha-stable distribution is used to fit the noise of THz image instead of the commonly-used Gaussian distribution. The database used in this study is composed of 181 THz image cubes with a test object as well as 2 empty image cubes. After analyzing the four parameters of alpha-stable distribution, we can observe that the noise patterns of THz images are indeed different from those of natural image obtained by RGB camera. The possible reasons are given based on the principles of the THz imaging device. The analysis of the distribution of four parameters of alpha-stable model demonstrates that there exists a nonlinear effect due to the change of reflected wave’s pattern caused by the body structure. This study provides an efficient and flexible model for THz images and a useful guidance for the design of THz image denoising algorithms and the development of imaging hardware.

Relying on large scale labeled datasets, deep learning has achieved good performance in image classification tasks. In agricultural and biological engineering, image annotation is time-consuming and expensive. It also requires annotators to have technical skills in specific areas. Obtaining the ground truth is difficult because natural images are expensive. In addition, images in these areas are usually stored as multichannel images, such as computed tomography (CT) images, magnetic resonance images (MRI), and hyperspectral images (HSI). In this paper, we present a framework using active learning and deep learning for multichannel image classification. We use three active learning algorithms, including least confidence, margin sampling, and entropy, as the selection criteria. Based on this framework, we further introduce an “image pool” to make full advantage of images generated by data augmentation. To prove the availability of the proposed framework, we present a case study on agricultural hyperspectral image classification. The results show that the proposed framework achieves better performance compared with the deep learning model. Manual annotation of all the training sets achieves an encouraging accuracy. In comparison, using active learning algorithm of entropy and image pool achieves a similar accuracy with only part of the whole training set manually annotated. In practical application, the proposed framework can remarkably reduce labeling effort during the model development and upadting processes, and can be applied to multichannel image classification in agricultural and biological engineering.