A Perception-guided CNN for Grape Bunch Detection

Smart farming is becoming an active and interdisciplinary research field as it requires to solve interesting and challenging research issues to respond concretely to the demands of specific use-cases. One of the most delicate tasks is the automatic yield estimation, as for example in vineyards [1]. Computer vision methods that implement the rules of the human visual system can contribute to task accomplishment as they simulate what winemakers make manually [2]. An automatic artificial-intelligence method for grape bunch detection from RGB images is presented. It properly defines the input of a Convolutional Neural Network whose task is the segmentation of grape bunches [3]. The network input consists of pointwise visual contrast-based measurements that allow us to discriminate and detect grape bunches even in uncontrolled acquisition conditions and with limited computational load. The latter property makes the proposed method implementable on smart devices and appropriate for onsite and real-time applications.