Agroindustrial plant for the classification of Hass avocados in real-time with
ResNet-18 architecture
Oscar Jhon Vera Ramirez José Emmanuel Cruz de la Cruz
Electronic Engineering Electronic Engineering
Universidad Nacional de Moquegua Universidad Nacional del Altiplano
Moquegua, Perú Puno, Perú
overar@unam.edu.pe josecruz@unap.edu.pe
Abstract— The avocado is the fruit with a growing trend in
production due to its demand in the world market. Peru
currently ranks third in the export of Hass type avocados. For
the efficient classification of avocados in good or bad condition,
a ResNet-18 algorithm applied to a robust agro-industrial plant
was implemented. By using a non-invasive classification we
reduce handling damage. The plant consists of a feeder system
that continues with a conveyor belt, followed by the image
acquisition system with its lighting system, finally, there is the
classification system formed by the pneumatic system consisting
of pistons that will deposit the avocados in the right containers.
The treatment of the images was developed in three stages:
acquisition, training, and implementation of the neural network.
The Deep Learning algorithm used is ResNet-18, and the
hyperparameters of the convolutional network were adjusted to
obtain a precision of 98.72%, a specificity of 98.52%, and an F1
score of 98.08%.
Keywords— Classification, ResNet-18, Avocado, industrial
plant.
I. INTRODUCTION
There are five hundred species of avocados of which the
most appreciated are Hass, Fuerte, Bacon, Reed, Pikerton,
Gween avocados. The worldwide consumption of Hass
avocado represents 80% of production, with Peru being the
third-largest exporter of avocados of this type worldwide. The
small and medium-scale agri-food industry has problems with
properly qualified personnel and long processing times, losing
the quality of classification due to staff fatigue and
subjectivities. By automating this process, the percentage of
quality is increased and the selected time is reduced. Sorting
technology consists of hardware and software that are
integrated to speed up industrial processes. There are several
methods of fruit classification such as: [1] that for the
detection of mangoes used CCD cameras in a real plant to
detect color, volume, size, shape, and density using artificial
intelligence techniques, focusing on the physical design of the
plant. Also [2] for the classification of diseases of banana,
apple, and cherry used convolutional neural networks, this
classification contains 28 layers that were trained from the
Imagenet dataset achieving a precision of 78.1%, which is
retrained using the technique of learning transfer. The system
proposed by [3] classifies the fruit based on the percentage of
infection, the system is developed in TensorFlow, the research
for classification that explores a convolutional neural network
model taking into account the learning rate, the batch size, and
epoch number, three parameters that influence network
performance. The experimental results show that when other
parameters remain unchanged, the errors trained by the
network model decrease significantly as the learning rate
increases. For the classification by deep convolutional neural
XXX-X-XXXX-XXXX-X/XX/$XX.00 ©20XX IEEE
Wilson Antony Mamani Machaca
Electronic Engineering
Universidad Nacional del Altiplano
Puno, Perú
wilmamanimac@est.unap.edu.pe
networks, of apples in four grades, grade 1 being the best
quality and grade 4 the damaged ones, I use preprocessing that
consists of segmentation techniques and elimination of
antecedents to extract the area of the fruit, the network I used
90% of data for training and obtained a precision of 85% [4].
[5] coincides with the image processing to identify the state of
the avocado leaf, it uses k-means, in a saturation-value space
at the superpixel level, to segment the leaf from the uniform
background from images captured in the field under semi-
controlled conditions; and a shallow neural network to classify
histograms composed of leaves segmented into 4 states:
healthy, iron deficiency, magnesium deficiency, and spider
mite infestation, the proposed method separates the leaf from
the background with a mean F score of 0.98 and classifies the
blade condition with an overall accuracy of 96.8%. For the
classification of the fruit by using the oriented gradient
function histogram and extreme learning machine, it uses the
oriented gradient histogram: Extreme Learning Machine
(ELM), achieving a precision of 95%, in this study an SVM
comparison classifier obtaining a precision of 97.3%; To
extract the characteristics, the Gradient Histogram (HOG)
function was used with 9 containers representing gradient
angles 0, 20, 40… 160 [6]. [7] maintains that for the maturity
classification of the fresh palm fruit bunch oil (FFB), an
artificial neural network (ANA) was used on a total of 80 oil
palm samples, the segmentation method used was k-means,
applied on a multilayer perceptron (MLP). One of the types of
neural networks found in the state of the art in image
classification is ResNet. For example [8] proposes a modified
ResNet network through adjustable direct access connections,
achieving a 3.66% improvement over the original ResNet
network, using the CIFAR 10 dataset to carry out its tests. [9]
It also proposes a modification of ResNet called LDS-ResNet
inspired by residual blocks of linear dynamic systems, the test
is carried out on three image databases: CIFAR-10, CIFAR-
100, and ImageNet, indicating that the proposed system
exceeds the original ResNet system. [10] proposes a
modification of a convolutional neural network called
FusionNet for the detection of invasive ductal carcinoma and
subtypes of breast cancer lymphoma, achieving a 5.06%
improvement in the F parameters compared to other methods
such as UNet and ResNet. [11] uses Inception ResNet to detect
polyps, taking as a CVC-Clinic polyp frame database, the tests
are performed not only on images but also on videos. [12]
proposes a combination of optimized S transform and a
ResNet network to detect from the respiratory sounds: normal,
wheezing, and adventitious crunching diseases such as
asthma, obstructive pulmonary diseases, pneumonia,
bronchitis, achieving an accuracy close to 99%. [13] uses
ResNet and VGG to identify people by voice, with the
VoxCeleb database improving performance by 0.9% over
traditional methods such as VoxCeleb. This article seeks to A. Data acquisition
classify avocados in good or bad conditions using an agro- For the network training stage, 492 images obtained from
industrial plant and an image recognition algorithm using a the fruit 360 dataset were used.
deep convolutional neural network with Resnet-18
architecture. The contributions of the article are:
- Implementation of real smart agriculture using a real-
time avocado sorting plant composed of industrial
elements such as PLCs, variable speed drives,
pneumatic systems, and infrared sensors.
- Implementation of a deep neural network of ResNet-
18 architecture by optimizing parameters such as
geometric transformations, to train the network
properly, learning rate, and times in the training phase
to correct overfitting errors and data mismatch.
II. SYSTEM DESCRIPTION
The plant is located in the robotics laboratory of the
National University of Moquegua that is shown in Fig. 1.

Fig. 2. Sample of the dataset used.

As can be seen in Fig. 2, the avocados are classified by

Fig. 1. Avocado sorting plant.
The plant consists of the Othelo w360 Micronics camera
with a resolution of 640x480 pixels with 06 built-in LED
lights. The Core I7 data processor (PC) with 16G RAM with
a GeForce GTX 1650 GPU. The sorting plant has a routed
conveyor belt controlled by a 1HP 3-phase motor at a
constant speed. The plant feeder is controlled by a 1/2 HP
motor. The pneumatic sorting mechanism has 6 cylinders that
control the final sorting system. This whole system is
governed by an S7 1200 PLC. The software stage is made up
of TIA PORTAL (OPC), a sequential algorithm, and the
ResNet-18 neural network that classifies avocados.
The classification process begins when the avocados,
after passing through the feeder stage, are deposited on the
conveyor belt, pass through the Othelo w360 Micronics
chamber, and the constant lighting system of 2356 lux and at
a height of 40cm. The camera detects the avocados and sends
the information to the computer, which has a ResNet-18
neural network that classifies avocados in good and bad
condition, activating pistons through pneumatic actuators, the
plant will deposit the avocados in the respective categories of
containers. The presence of avocados is detected by six
infrared sensors that send information to the computer to
classify them. The conveyor belt has a length of 5 m. The
sensors are located 25cm from each other on one side of the
routed conveyor belt.
There are four stages to classification in software:
color determining if they are in good or bad condition.
B. ResNet-18 Architecture
Decision-making from images is a developing area that
has been applied in all fields of science. For this, we have
artificial neural networks that, from directly connected layers,
manage to classify the images according to the chosen criteria.
A variant of artificial neural networks is convolutional neural
networks, which use the principle of deep neural networks to
achieve their objective. The architecture of deep neural
networks allows, from their convolutional layers and their
non-linear activation function, to extract specific
characteristics from the images to be classified. Due to the
process of convolution and application of the activation
function (softmax), it happens that the resulting matrices each
time decrease in size, eliminating characteristics that are
probably desirable for classification. To solve this, deep
residual networks are used by adding identity mappings as
shown in Fig. 3.
Fig. 3. Residual learning: a building block.
In the present study, ResNet-18, a residual network of 18
convolutional layers, was used to extract the essential
characteristics of the avocados to be classified, without
reaching the degradation implied by using more convolutional
layers. The architecture used is shown in Fig. 4.
 Fig. 4. ResNet-18 architecture used.

The system first read the input resized images of 224 x 224
x 3 with the value of 3 representing the three color channels
used. After clustering in the last convolutional layer, it is fed
to the next stage which is a fully connected neural network to
achieve the final classification result.
C. Training
The size of the images was reduced to 224x224 pixels,
geometric transformations such as rotation, and translation
were performed. The learning range was established between
1x10-6 and 1x10-4 to obtain high accuracy and thus condition
the pre-trained network to classify the avocados in the plant.
D. Implementation of the trained network Fig. 6. Classification plant flow chart.
It is the stage responsible for identifying and making
decisions for the classification of each avocado, taking as Fig. 7 shows the number of images classified correctly and
reference the weights established in the neural network incorrectly, having 67 true negatives, 1 false positive, 2 false
acquired in the learning stage. negatives, and 77 true positives.

Fig. 5 shows the avocados in the lighting system

transported by the routed belt that will be later classified by
the ResNet-18 algorithm.

Fig. 5. Images of avocados to be classified. Fig. 7. Confusion matrix.

III. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION Fig. 8 shows the loss vs the learning rate of the ResNet-18
The equipment is turned on and the plant is initialized network, which has a linear learning rate model in the range
through Tia Portal, at the same time the python script is 1e-06 to 1e-01.
started. Subsequently, the avocados that enter the image
acquisition system are fed, which are transferred to the trained
algorithm (ResNet-18 architecture) for classification. The
ResNet-18 architecture sends a signal to the selection stage
composed of infrared sensors and pistons that deposit the
avocado in the appropriate container, performing this entire
process iteratively. In Fig. 6 the described system is detailed
through a flow chart:

Fig. 8. Loss vs Learning Rate.

 Fig. 9 shows the behavior of the ResNet-18 neural network
with the training and validation data, it can be seen in the
following figure that indicates that when iterating the neural
network, the loss is reduced making the classification more
optimal obtaining a minimum loss:
Fig. 9. Lost in Data.
agriculture solution was implemented using a real-time
avocado sorting plant composed of industrial elements such as
PLC's, variable speed drives, pneumatic systems, and infrared
sensors in combination with the software formed by ResNet-
18 neural networks, managing to classify avocados in good or
poor condition through the optimization of the parameter such
as Learning rate, epochs, and geometric transformations to
avoid overfitting and data mismatch. Taking as a reference a
previous work in the same plant, which was carried out with a
dataset of 154 avocados, obtaining a precision of 60%; In this
article, a data set of 492 avocados was used to train it with a
ResNet-18 type neural network. An accuracy of 97.95% was
obtained, improving the system by 37.95% compared to the
study mentioned above. The sensitivity reached values of
97.46%. The positive predictions (Precision) reached 98.71%
and the F1 parameter reached a value of 98.08%. The system
can be improved by increasing the number of images for the
training phase or by applying a hybrid method for the neural
network, such as increasing the number of layers for the
convolution phase or for the fully connected network.

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