Digital Eye is an innovative, rapid and high-precision intelligent computer vision system for the non-destructive and contactless evaluation of quality and shelf-life of whole or fresh-cut fruit and vegetables. It integrates advanced vision and artificial intelligence technologies to estimate parameters useful to evaluate the quality of fruit and vegetables, during both the harvesting phase and the cold chain. Digital Eye uses a commercial RGB camera (AP3200TPGE (JAI Ltd., Yokohama, Japan) placed inside a commercial photographic box (HPB60D box, HAVOXR, Vendome, France) equipped with LED lighting and acquisition and image processing software developed in Matlab (MathWorks Inc., Natick, MA, USA). In addition to quality evaluation based on visible morphological traits, Digital Eye is able to assess some internal quality traits, associated to color variations induced during the storage by physiological processes that limit marketability. Digital Eye can analyze the quality of packaged ready-to-use fresh fruit and vegetables (fresh-cut) with performances similar to the ones on unpackaged products: a robust image segmentation technique identifies the areas in which the product is visible without the artefacts related to shadows or light reflections.
Digital Eye provides an automatic, consistent, rapid, non-destructive, and contactless evaluation of the quality level (degree of freshness) of fruit and vegetables. The use of artificial intelligence minimizes the intervention of external operators during the design, configuration and starting phases. Digital Eye is scalable and applicable to other types of products through the training of models on new samples without modifying its architecture. It is flexible, resistant, easily transportable, and installable in the different working environments of the supply chain (laboratory, warehouse, retail, etc.). It is integrable with other software (for the logistics management of large-scale retail trade) or other Apps on smartphone or Internet of Things. It can evaluate useful parameters along the supply chain (e.g. nutritional values, storage time, level of freshness, level of browning, ammonia content, senescence indicators, maturation…). Digital Eye can offer competitive advantages by enabling objective, coherent and pervasive control of products along the whole supply chain, from producers to final consumers. It can increase the final consumer satisfaction and a reduction in food losses and waste.