Vision-based fruit recognition via multi-scale attention CNN

Fruit quality assessment, grading and sorting are of vital importance to fruit processing, and all these involve fruit recognition. Vision-based fruit recognition can recognize fruit automatically and further support more applications such as fruit-picking robots, self-checkout service, and dietary guidance. Recent works resort to Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) for vision-based fruit recognition because of their powerful expressive capacity. However, most works simply utilize existing CNNs and ignore characteristics of fruit images, resulting in sub-optimal recognition performance. To solve this problem, we adopt a Multi-Scale Attention Network (MSANet), which explores attention from different layers of CNNs and aggregates various visual attentional features from different levels into final comprehensive representations. Extensive evaluations on four fruit benchmark datasets demonstrate that the method achieves state-of-the-art recognition performance. In addition, we report various experimental results from different deep networks as baselines. Codes and models will be released upon publication. Models and code are available at http://123.57.42.89/codes/msanet.html.