Deep Learning based Corn Kernel Classification

Abstract

This paper presents a full pipeline to classify sample sets of corn kernels. The proposed approach follows a segmentation-classification scheme. The image segmentation is performed through a well known deep learning-based approach, the Mask R-CNN architecture, while the classification is performed through a novel-lightweight network specially designed for this task—good corn kernel, defective corn kernel and impurity categories are considered. As a second contribution, a carefully annotated multitouching corn kernel dataset has been generated. This dataset has been used for training the segmentation and the classification modules. Quantitative evaluations have been performed and comparisons with other approaches are provided showing improvements with the proposed pipeline.