Innovative Models Built Based on Image Textures Using Traditional Machine Learning Algorithms for Distinguishing Different Varieties of Moroccan Date Palm Fruit (Phoenix dactylifera L.)

The aim of this study was to develop the procedure for the varietal discrimination of date palm fruit using image analysis and traditional machine learning techniques. The fruit images of ‘Mejhoul’, ‘Boufeggous’, ‘Aziza’, ‘Assiane’, and ‘Bousthammi’ date varieties, converted to individual color channels, were processed to extract the texture parameters. After performing the attribute selection, the textures were used to build models intended for the discrimination of different varieties of date palm fruit using machine learning algorithms from Functions, Bayes, Lazy, Meta, and Trees groups. Models were developed for combining image textures selected from a set of all color channels and for sets of textures selected for individual color spaces and color channels. The models, including combined textures selected from all color channels, distinguished all five varieties with an average accuracy reaching 98%, and ‘Bousthammi’ and ‘Mejhoul’ were completely correctly discriminated for the SMO (Functions) and IBk (Lazy) machine learning algorithms. By reducing the number of varieties, the correctness of the date palm fruit classification increased. The models developed for the three most different date palm fruit varieties ‘Boufeggous’, ‘Bousthammi’, and ‘Mejhoul’ revealed an average discrimination accuracy of 100% for each algorithm used (SMO, Naive Bayes (Bayes), IBk, LogitBoost (Meta), and LMT (Trees)). In the case of individual color spaces and channels, the accuracies were lower, reaching 97.3% for color space RGB and SMO and LMT algorithms for all five varieties and 99.63% for Naive Bayes and IBk for the ‘Boufeggous’, ‘Bousthammi’, and ‘Mejhoul’ date palm fruits. The results can be used in practice to develop vision systems for sorting and distinguishing the varieties of date palm fruit to authenticate the variety of the fruit intended for further processing.