Fruit classification by biogeography-based optimization and feedforward neural network

Accurate fruit classification is difficult to accomplish because of the similarities among the various categories. In this paper, we proposed a novel fruit‐classification system, with the goal of recognizing fruits in a more efficient way. Our methodology included the following steps. First, a four‐step pre‐processing was employed. Second, the features (colour, shape, and texture) were extracted. Third, we utilized principal component analysis to remove excessive features. Fourth, a novel fruit‐classification system based on biogeography‐based optimization (BBO) and feedforward neural network (FNN) was proposed, with the short name of BBO‐FNN. The experiment employed over 1653 chromatic fruit images (18 categories) by fivefold stratified cross‐validation. The results showed that the proposed BBO‐FNN yielded an overall accuracy of 89.11%, which was higher than the five state‐of‐the‐art methods: genetic algorithm‐FNN, artificial bee colony‐FNN, particle swarm optimization‐FNN, kernel support vector machine, and ant colony optimization‐FNN. Also, the BBO‐FNN achieved the same accuracy as fitness‐scaling chaotic artificial bee colony‐FNN, but it performed much faster than the latter. The proposed BBO‐FNN was effective in fruit‐classification in terms of classification accuracy and computation time. This indicated that it can be applied in credible use.