Ripeness classification is one of the most challenging tasks in the postharvest management of mulberry fruit. The risks of microbial contamination and human error in manual sorting are significant; it may result in quality degradation and wasting of processed products. Due to advanced developments in computer vision and machine learning, automated sorting became possible. This study presents the results of developing and testing a computer vision-based application using convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for the classification of mulberry fruit ripening stages. To reduce the training cost and improve the accuracy of classification, transfer learning was used to fine-tune the CNN models. The CNN models in the test include DenseNet, Inception-v3, ResNet-18, ResNet-50, and AlexNet. Transfer learning was used to fine-tune the models and improve the accuracy of classification. The AlexNet and ResNet-18 networks exhibited the best performance with 98.32% and 98.65% overall accuracy for classifying the ripeness of white and black mulberries, respectively. Moreover, the performance of the models did not change when the data sets of both genotypes were mixed. The ResNet-18 was able to classify both genotype and ripeness from 600 fruit images in 2.36 min with an overall accuracy of 98.03%, which was superior to other architectures. It indicates that the model could be used for precise classification of the ripening stages of mulberries and other horticultural products, as a part of an automated sorting system.

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