2018 Third International Conference on Electrical, Electronics, Communication, Computer Technologies and Optimization Techniques
(ICEECCOT) 14-15, December 2018
Segmentation of Arecanut Bunches using HSV Color
Model
Dhanesha R.
Dept. of studies in CS&E
U. B. D. T. College of Engineering,
Davanagere, Karnataka, India 577004
dhaneshphddoc@gmail.com
Abstract—Arecanut is one of the commercial crop of south India.
Arecanut maturity level decides its price in the market. To
maximize the profitability, Farmer needs expertise to determine
the maturity level of Arecanut. This lack of ability leads to low
profit for their crops. Use of Image Processing and Computer
Vision techniques in precision agriculture allowed farmers to
take necessary steps to harvest by identifying the maturity level
of fruits and vegetables. To identify maturity level segmentation
of Arecanut bunches is required for automated expertise. In this
paper, proposed a segmentation method to segment Arecanut
bunches using HSV color model towards the view of identifying
automatic maturity level of arecanut bunches. The results of
experiment clarifies the proposed method effectiveness which is
better to segment the arecanut bunches for future analysis.
Index Terms—ripeness, harvesting, segmentation, erosion, closing,
arecanut bunches and HSV (Hue Saturation Value).
I. INTRODUCTION
Arecanut is the dried seed of the palm tree. Arecanut play
a prominent role in the religious, social, culture functions
and in economic life of the people in India. The fourth most
frequently used psychoactive substance is Areca catechu in
the world after nicotine, alcohol and caffeine. In India 4.73
lakh hectares (HA) of land has been utilized for Arecanut
cultivation with the production of 7.06 lakh tons. Majority of
Arecanut grows in the states of Karnataka and Kerala [9].
Arecanut is one of the major commercial crop of
south India. Apart from chewing purpose, it is used as
ingredients in making areca tea, soaps, diabetes formulations,
tooth powder, pan masala, gutka, soft drinks, wines and
ayurvedic medicine [9].
Figure 1, shows parts of Arecanut plant. The maximum
height of Arecanut plant is 30 to 40 feet and maximum round
bark of stem is 15 to 20 cm. it is purely depends on varieties
of Arecanut plants.
In Arecanut plantation (farming), the nut bearing
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Shrinivasa Naika C. L.
Dept. of studies in CS&E
U. B. D. T. College of Engineering,
Davanagere, Karnataka, India 577004
naika2k6@gmail.com
starts after 5 years of planting. Different stages of matured
arecanut are starts with spadix, which includes male and
female flowers. Male flowers become waste inflorescences
and female flowers become arecanuts. After spadix it will
take 6 months to become matured arecanut. Farmer not able
to track which spadix completed 6 months, because in one
hectare of land it may contain 1200 arecanut plants and each
plant may contain 4 to 5 bunches. So, it is difficult for farmer
to identify ripeness level before harvest.
Figure 1. Parts of Arecanut Plant
Arecanut bunches are broadly classified into two types such
as immature (unripe) and mature (ripe, overripe) bunches.
Harvesting immature arecanut bunches it is huge loss for
farmer. Figure 2, shows Api, Bette, Mine and Gotu are the
different levels of Arecanut in respect of maturity levels of
Arecanut.. The different maturity level of Arecanut decides
the price of it in market. The maturity level increases, the
cost of arecanut decreases.
To maximize profitability of crop, Farmer needs to
know maturity level of Arecanut before harvesting. Nowadays
there is lack of expert labors to identify maturity level of
Arecanut bunches. So, its very tiresome job for a farmer to
harvest Arecanut bunches with an accurate maturity level.
As mentioned above different levels of arecanut are
37
 of color gives more grayness of color and more fades of color
will appear. In proposed work, saturation value is normalised
in range of 0–1.

Figure 2. Analysis of Maturity level

available, if the former failed to harvest the arecanut bunches
in time, it leads to low profit for their crops.
In precision agriculture Image processing and computer
vision techniques are grown rapidly. Anuja Bhargava and
Atul Bansal [1], described a detailed summary of various
techniques to classify fruits and vegetables quality by
considering features as color, shape, texture and size. In
[2], a method was presented for detection of deficiency in
orange fruits. Segmentation technique are used for detection
of defects in orange fruits. To classify defects orange fruits
graph based and k-means clustering techniques are used.
Stephen Nuske et.al [5], presented an automated method
using shape and texture features to recognize and determine
number of grape berries. The number of grape berries decides
the crop yield to generate per vine estimation. Ajit Danti and
suresha [3], presented a method to classify two category of
raw Arecanut. Raw Arecanut are classified using the variation
of RGB components with upper and lower limits based on
red and green color as dominant color.
Figure 3. Hue range [7].
Hue refers to color type, such as red (0◦ - 60◦ ), yellow
(60◦ - 120◦ ), green(120◦ - 180◦ ), cyan,(180◦ -240◦ ), blue(240◦ -
300◦ ), magenta(300◦ - 360◦ ). (as it is described in Figure 3).
Figure 4, shows a decent illustration of HSV color space,
where the hue is portrayed as a three-dimensional cone like
formation of the color wheel. The saturation is delineated by
the area from middle of a circular cross-sectional of the cone.
The value is the distance from the pointed end of the cone.
To convert RGB image to HSV image, first need to
extract Red(r), Green (g) and Blue (b) components of an
image. To extract Red component make other two components
(Green and Blue) of RGB image as zero intensity. To extract
Green component make Red and Blue components of RGB
image as zero intensity. Similarly, extract Blue component by
making Red and Green components as zero intensity.

D. Stajnko et.al [8], proposed computerized vision

based approach using HSV color space for analysis of fruit
color to detect apples. Also described the estimation of
diameter and determination of number of apple fruit on a
Figure 4. Conical representation of the HSV model [7].
tree. Garrett M. Johnson et.al [6], presented a survey on
color spaces to derive new color space and also described The following expressions (eqs. (1)(2)(3) and(4)) are used
to calculate color differences using spatial filters. Dah-Jye to covert RGB color space to HSV color space.
Lee et.al [4], presented a color segmentation method by (
considering color as main feature to determine the quality of θ, if b Lessthan or equalto g
fruits and in turn decides the grading of fruits such as tomato Hue = (1)
360 − θ, if b Greaterthan g
and dates.

In this paper, in order to segment the arecanut bunches; with

a HSV color model is exploited to segment the bunches 
0.5 ∗ [(r − g) + (r − b)]

−1
which would be used towards attuning detection of automatic θ = cos (2)
[(r − g)2 + (r − b)(g − b)]0.5
maturity level of arecanut bunches.
The saturation(Sat) channel is computed by
A. RGB to HSV color model
3
HSV color model, in which H represents Hue (color-depth) Sat = 1 − [min(r, g, b)] (3)
(r + g + b)
, S represents Saturation (color-purity) and V represents value
of intensity (color-brightness). HSV is also referred as Finally, Value(Val) channel is computed by
HSB (Hue Saturation Brightness) and HSI (Hue Saturation
Intensity). Hue defines pure color in terms of green, red or 1
V al =
(r + g + b). (4)
magenta. When measured in degrees Hue ranges from 0◦ to 3
360◦ . Saturation refers to purity of color. It takes values from It is assumed that angle theta is computed in HSV space in
0% (gray) to 100% (pure color), means lower the saturation respect of Red axis and the values of rgb is normalized to

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span between 0 and 1. without image, processing of image is not possible. In this
proposed work, used mobile phone as device to capture
To classify the agricultural products it is found one images with fixed distance, angle and time. The Dataset
of vital step is segmentation. In computer vision applications contains different maturity levels of images such as immature,
before classification it is essential to segment natural matured and over-matured arecanut bunches. It is followed
images. Arecanut is an example of natural images. In Indian by preprocessing where image enhancement is done. Finally
market analysis of Arecanut is an important task.The visual with respect to region of interest, image is segmented.
descriptors of natural images are considered for segmentation
of Arecanut bunches. Figure 6, shows the steps to be followed for segmentation
of Arecanut bunches.
B. Segmentation performance metrics
Normally ground truth images are used to verify the
results of segmentation process. Different metrics are used to
measure the accuracy of segmentation. The most commonly
used statistical measures are Volumetric Overlap Error (VOE)
and Dice Similarity Coefficient (DSC). Considering S as
segmented region using proposed method and G as the ground
truth image. The VOE and DSC are calculated based on their
definitions.

Volumetric Overlap Error is the ratio of the amount

of pixels within the intersection of segmented region and
also the ground truth, and variety of pixels within the union
of segmental region and therefore the ground truth. Good
segmentation should have values close to 0 and increase in
the score shows the discrepancies in the segmented image.
The VOE is computed by applying given Equ. 5.
V OE = ((|S ∩ G|/|S ∪ G|) − 1)100. (5)
Dice Similarity Coefficient (DSC) gives the measure of
the segmentation of pixels of the region of interest. Good
segmentation should have values close to 1 and the score near
to zero shows the discrepancies in the segmented image. DSC
is obtaind by using Equ. 6.
DSC = 2|S ∩ G|/(|S| + |G|). (6)
In this proposed work, VOE and DSC segmentation metrics
are used to measure the accuracy of segmentation.

In proposed work, segmentation of Arecanut bunches

is done through various steps of image processing. The HSV
color model is used for segmentation of bunches of natural
Arecanut images. Methodology section describes the details
of how Arecanut bunches are segmented.

II. METHODOLOGY

The first step of the system architecture(Figure 5) is

Figure 6. Flow chart of proposed method

As shown in Figure 6, to segment an arecanut bunch, first

Figure 5. System Architecture
image acquisition. In image process, image acquisition is a
process of capturing an image by some source. Typically
hardware is used as source for capturing an image. It is
one of the fundamental task in image processing because
read an image which is a RGB image. It is followed by the
preprocessing step, in which resizeing of image is performed.
The resized Image is converted to HSV image.
One of the main steps in image processing is to extract
needful features to segment an image. In detection of maturity
level of Arecanut bunches before harvesting Arecanut bunches

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 Image1
is to be segmented. Segmentation is a process of splitting an
image with respect to common properties. In this proposed
work, segmentation of arecanut bunches is performed by using
only saturation channel of HSV image. So, after converting
RGB to HSV image extract saturation image from HSV image.

To segment arecanut bunch from a saturation image

set the threshold and convert image to binary image. The Image2
resulted binary image consisting of unnecessary information.
To remove unnecessary information and filling gaps in an
image, morphological operations are used.

Morphological is a set of mathematical operations,

which is applied to input image and to produce output image
of same size by considering structuring element. Erosion
and Closing are the two important morphological operations. Image3
Object boundaries pixels are removed by applying erosion
operation. Erosion is performed by using disc as structuring
element. After applying erosion it is followed by closing
operation. Closing operation is used to fill the gaps in
an image. Considering disc as structuring element closing
operation is done by applying two operations in sequence;
dilution is followed by erosion. Then the resulted image
converted to original RGB image. Image4

III. RESULTS AND DISCUSSIONS

To put across our study, images are captured in-field at

different levels (unripe, ripe and overripe) of maturity of
arecanut bunches, because there are no dataset available for
arecanut bunches. In this proposed work, considering four
images from dataset, the results of segmentation is discussed
below. Figure 7(a) shows the input image is RBG image, is
converted to HSV image (Figure 7(b). The saturation channel
of HSV image is show in Figure 7(c), which is used to segment
Arecanut bunch.
(a) (b) (c)
Figure 7. Process to extract saturation channel.(a) Input image(RGB image)
(b) HSV image (c)Saturation image
(a) (b) (c)
Figure 8. Segmentation of unripe, ripe, overripe and premature arecanut
bunch.(a) Input image (b) Segmented image (c)Ground truth image
(Figure 8(b)) properly compare to ground truth image (Figure
8(c)). The value of VOE and DSC in Table 1 for Image4 shows
low performance, because input image contains more waste
inflorescences. Experiments were conducted on 200 images,
which includes different ripeness level of arecanut bunches.
The proposed segmentation method gives mean value of VOE
and DSC is -11.9380 and 0.9007 respectively. Hence, shows
that proposed technique is effective and simple to segment
arecanut bunches from given image.
TABLE 1. E VALUATION OF SEGMENTATION USING PERFORMANCE
METRICS

Figure 8(a), shows input image of unripe (Image1), Input Images VOE DSC
ripe (Image2), overripe (Image3) and premature (Image4)
Image1 -13.9041 0.9253
Arecanut bunches. After applying proposed segmentation
method result is obtained as shown in Figure 8(b). To Image2 -14.7773 0.9202
compute performance of segmentation obtained result image Image3 -16.2947 0.9113
is compared with Ground truth image (Figure 8(c)).
Image4 -62.1387 0.5493

The computed value of VOE and DSC shown in Table 1, for

un-matured, matured, over-matured and premature Arecanut
bunches. As given earlier for better segmentation results, the
values of VOE close to 0 and DSC close to 1. Figure 8, for Im-
age4 it shows that input image (Figure 8(a)) is not segmented

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 IV. CONCLUSION

In this paper, a segmentation method using HSV color

model was presented. Experiments were conducted on two
hundred Arecanut bunch images, which incorporate different
maturity levels. Experimental results show that, the projected
methodology segments Arecanut bunches from an associate
input image with the accuracy of 85% to 90%. The segmenta-
tion performance metrics VOE and DSC are used to measure
accuracy of obtained results. Ground truth images are used
to compare with the obtained results. The proposed technique
may not segment arecanut bunches properly once a picture
is captured in poor condition and additionally if a picture
contains more waste inflorescences(male flowers) in arecanut
bunch.

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