TopoGeoFusion: Integrating object topology based feature computation methods into geometrical feature analysis to enhance classification performance.

This study used smartphone captured RGB images of gooseberries to automatically sort into standard, premium, or rejected categories based on topology. Main challenges addressed include, separation of touching or overlapping fruits into individual entities and new method called 'TopoGeoFusion' that combines basic geometrical features with topology aware features computed from the fruits to assess the grade or maturity. Quality assessment helps in grading the fruit to determine market suitability and intelligent camera applications. Computer Vision-based techniques have been applied to automatically grade the quality of gooseberries as standard, premium, or rejected according to fruit maturity. Smartphone-captured images of 1697 Indian Star Gooseberries are contributed to the study. This work acquired images consisting multiple fruits with overlapping and non-overlapping boundaries for concurrent quality assessment. Multiple classifiers such as Random Forest, SVM, Naive Bayes, Decision Tree, and KNN were applied to grade the gooseberry fruit. Random Forest classification with a fusion feature model resulted in an accuracy of 100 % towards reject, standard, and premium classes for test sets with four training strategies. The proposed segmentation model proves reliable in fruit detection & extraction with an average mAP of 0.56, resulting in an acceptable model for grade assessment.•The study highlights the effectiveness of TopoGeoFusion in automating the grading process of gooseberry fruits using topologically computed features.•The developed models exhibit high accuracy and reliability, even in challenging scenarios such as overlapping and touching fruits.•The method provides the technique to detect and extract the occluded objects and compute the features based on the partial object's topology.