AI Detects Papaya Ripeness

If you're in the market to buy fresh papayas, it can be a challenge to figure out ripeness based on peel color without also squeezing the fruit to test for softness. A Brazilian research group could make life easier for both shoppers and producers in the near future with a computer vision algorithm that estimates ripeness based on images alone. Last year, the United States alone imported more than US $107 million worth of fresh papayas as the world's largest papaya import market. The computer vision software could enable papaya growers to maximize the value of their fruit by sending the ripest papayas to local markets and saving less ripe papayas for export, says Douglas Fernandes Barbin, a researcher in the department of food engineering at the University of Campinas in São Paulo, Brazil. But he and his colleagues also want to help individual shoppers get their money's worth in grocery aisles.