A Real-Time Nut-Type Classifier Application Using Transfer Learning

Smart environments need artificial intelligence (AI) at the moment and will likely utilize AI in the foreseeable future. Shopping has recently been seen as an environment needing to be digitized, especially for payment processes of both packaged and unpackaged products. In particular, for unpackaged nuts, machine learning models are applied to newly collected dataset to identify the type. Furthermore, transfer learning (TL) has been identified as a promising method to diminish the time and effort for obtaining learning models for different classification problems. There are common TL architectures that can be used to transfer learned knowledge between different problem domains. In this study, TL architectures including ResNet, EfficientNet, Inception, and MobileNet were used to obtain a practical nut-type identifier application to satisfy the challenges of implementing a classifier for unpackaged products. In addition to the TL models, we trained a convolutional neural network (CNN) model on a dataset including 1250 images of 5 different nut types prepared from online-available and manually captured images. The models are evaluated according to a set of parameters including validation loss, validation accuracy, and F1-score. According to the evaluation results, TL models show a promising performance with 96% validation accuracy.