Convolutional Neural Network (CNN)-based transfer learning framework for cherry tomato production

Authors

  • Hyeongjun Lim 1. Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, Dongguk University-Seoul, Seoul, 04620, Republic of Korea
  • Youngjin Kim 1. Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, Dongguk University-Seoul, Seoul, 04620, Republic of Korea
  • Sumin Kim 2. Department of Environmental Horticulture&Landscape Architecture, Dankook University, Chungnam, Republic of Korea
  • Sojung Kim 1. Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, Dongguk University-Seoul, Seoul, 04620, Republic of Korea http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7744-0686

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.25165/ijabe.v18i5.9827

Keywords:

transfer learning, smart farming, cherry tomatoes, yield estimation, convolutional neural network, computer vision.

Abstract

As crop harvesting becomes more difficult in environments affected by climate change, the application of artificial intelligence technology to crop management through accurate yield prediction is receiving worldwide attention. This study proposes a convolutional neural network (CNN)-based transfer learning framework to increase the productivity and improve the economic feasibility of cherry tomatoes (solanum lycopersicum) in South Korea. You-Only-Look-Once 10 Nano (YOLOv10n) is adopted as a CNN-based algorithm. The source model for transfer learning is trained using cherry tomato imagery from the Tomato Plantfactory Dataset, while the target model is trained based on field survey data collected by the National Institute of Horticultural & Herbal Science, Rural Development Administration, Korea. In that process, an image segmentation technique is developed to improve the prediction accuracy, which reduces the root-mean-square deviation of the existing YOLOv10n from 32.3 to 19.8, a 38.7% reduction. Also, the devised economic feasibility analysis method finds the cost of producing cherry tomatoes in South Korea to be 11.12 USD/m2, while the maximum revenue can reach 22.44 USD/m2. As a result, the proposed transfer learning framework helps general farms where it is difficult to collect big data to use machine learning techniques to predict crop or vegetable production. Keywords: transfer learning, smart farming, cherry tomatoes, yield estimation, convolutional neural network, computer vision. DOI: 10.25165/j.ijabe.20251805.9827 Citation: Lim H, Kim Y, Kim S, Kim S. Convolutional Neural Network (CNN)-based transfer learning framework for cherry tomato production. Int J Agric & Biol Eng, 2025; 18(5): 90–101.

Author Biographies

Sumin Kim, 2. Department of Environmental Horticulture&Landscape Architecture, Dankook University, Chungnam, Republic of Korea

Assistant Professor, Department of Environmental Horticulture & Landscape Architecture, Dankook University, Chungnam, Republic of Korea

Sojung Kim, 1. Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, Dongguk University-Seoul, Seoul, 04620, Republic of Korea

Associate Professor Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering Dongguk University-Seoul

References

Singh S, Singh P, Singh G, Sandhu A S. Crop productivity and energy indices of tomato (Solanum lycopersicum) production under naturally-ventilated poly-house structures in north-western India. Energy, 2025; 314: 134239.

Quinet M, Angosto T, Yuste-Lisbona F J, Blanchard-Gros R, Bigot S, Martinez J P, et al. Tomato fruit development and metabolism. Frontiers in Plant Science, 2019; 10: 1554.

Kim D, Shawon, M R A, Lee ., Lee Y, Kim M, Choi K. Effects of drip irrigation volumes on plant growth and yield of tomato grown in perlite. Journal of Bio-Environment Control, 2022; 31(4): 300–310. (in Korean)

Türkten H, Ceyhan V. Environmental efficiency in greenhouse tomato production using soilless farming technology. Journal of Cleaner Production, 2023; 398: 136482.

Rivard C L, Sydorovych O, O’Connell S, Peet M M, Louws F J. An economic analysis of two grafted tomato transplant production systems in the United States. Hort Technology, 2010; 20(4): 794–803.

Guo X X, Zhao D, Zhuang M H, Wang C, Zhang F S. Fertilizer and pesticide reduction in cherry tomato production to achieve multiple environmental benefits in Guangxi, China. Science of the Total Environment, 2021; 793: 148527.

Lee H, Lee J G, Hong K H, Kwon D H, Cho M C, Hwang I, et al. Improving growth and yield in cherry tomato by using rootstocks. Journal of Bio-Environment Control, 2021; 30(3): 196–205. (in Korean)

Idoje G, Dagiuklas T, Iqbal M. Survey for smart farming technologies: Challenges and issues. Computers & Electrical Engineering, 2021; 92: 107104.

Liu G, Nouaze J C, Touko Mbouembe P L, Kim J H. YOLO-tomato: A robust algorithm for tomato detection based on YOLOv3. Sensors, 2020; 20(7): 2145.

Yang D, Ju C. Performance comparison of cherry tomato ripeness detection using multiple YOLO models. Agri Engineering, 2024; 7(1): 8.

Nyalala I, Okinda C, Nyalala L, Makange N, Chao Q, Chao L, et al. Tomato volume and mass estimation using computer vision and machine learning algorithms: Cherry tomato model. Journal of Food Engineering, 2019; 263: 288–298.

Kabas O, Kayakus M, Ünal İ, Moiceanu G. Deformation energy estimation of cherry tomato based on some engineering parameters using machine-learning algorithms. Applied Sciences, 2023; 13(15): 8906.

Kim S, Kim Y, On Y, So J, Yoon C Y, Kim S. Hybrid performance modeling of an agrophotovoltaic system in South Korea. Energies, 2022; 15(18): 6512.

Jiang P, Ergu D, Liu F, Cai Y, Ma B. A review of Yolo algorithm developments. Procedia Computer Science, 2022; 199: 1066–1073.

Wu Z W, Liu M H, Sun C X, Wang X F. A dataset of tomato fruits images for object detection in the complex lighting environment of plant factories. Data in Brief, 2023; 48: 109291.

Park B M, Jeong H B, Yang E Y, Kim M K, Kim J W, Chae W, et al. Differential responses of cherry tomatoes (Solanum lycopersicum) to long-term heat stress. Horticulturae, 2023; 9(3): 343.

Redmon J. You only look once: Unified, real-time object detection. In: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition. Las Vegas, NV, USA: IEEE, 2016; pp.779–788. doi: 10.1109/CVPR.2016.91.

Zhang F, Dong D, Jia X, Guo J, Yu X. Sugarcane-YOLO: An improved YOLOv8 model for accurate identification of sugarcane seed sprouts. Agronomy, 2024; 14(10): 2412.

Felzenszwalb P F, Girshick R B, McAllester D, Ramanan D. Object detection with discriminatively trained part-based models. IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 2009; 32(9): 1627–1645.

Girshick R, Donahue J, Darrell T, Malik J. Rich feature hierarchies for accurate object detection and semantic segmentation. In: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition. Columbus, OH, USA: IEEE, 2014; 580–587. doi: 10.1109/CVPR.2014.81.

Ali M L, Zhang Z. The YOLO framework: A comprehensive review of evolution, applications, and benchmarks in object detection. Computers, 2024; 13(12): 336.

Wang A, Chen H, Liu L, Chen K, Lin Z, Han J, Ding G. Yolov10: Real-time end-to-end object detection. In: Thirty-Eighth Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems. Vancouver, Canada: NIPS, 2024; 3429: 107984.

Hussain M, Khanam R. In-depth review of yolov1 to yolov10 variants for enhanced photovoltaic defect detection. Solar, 2024; 4(3): 351–386.

Liu S, Qi L, Qin H, Shi J, Jia J. Path aggregation network for instance segmentation. In: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition. Salt Lake City, UT, USA: IEEE, 2018; 8759–8768. doi: 10.1109/CVPR.2018.00913.

Lin T Y, Dollár P, Girshick R, He K, Hariharan B, Belongie S. Feature pyramid networks for object detection. In: IEEE conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition. Honolulu, HI, USA: IEEE, 2017; 2117–2125. doi: 10.1109/CVPR.2017.106.

Rong J, Zhou H, Zhang F, Yuan T, Wang P. Tomato cluster detection and counting using improved YOLOv5 based on RGB-D fusion. Computers and Electronics in Agriculture, 2023; 207: 107741.

Bansal M A, Sharma D R, Kathuria D M. A systematic review on data scarcity problem in deep learning: solution and applications. ACM Computing Surveys (Csur), 2022; 54(10s): 1–29.

Monte J A, Carvalho D F D, Medici L O, da Silva L D, Pimentel C. Growth analysis and yield of tomato crop under different irrigation depths. Soil, Water and Plant Management, 2013; 17: 926–931.

Moccia S, Chiesa A, Oberti A, Tittonell P A. Yield and quality of sequentially grown cherry tomato and lettuce under long-term conventional, low-input and organic soil management systems. European Journal of Horticultural Science, 2006; 71(4): 183–191.

Shabbir A, Mao H, Ullah I, Buttar N A, Ajmal M, Lakhiar I A. Effects of drip irrigation emitter density with various irrigation levels on physiological parameters, root, yield, and quality of cherry tomato. Agronomy, 2020; 10(11): 1685.

Joubes J, Phan T H, Just D, Rothan C, Bergounioux C, Raymond P, et al. Molecular and biochemical characterization of the involvement of cyclin-dependent kinase A during the early development of tomato fruit. Plant Physiology, 1999; 121(3): 857–869.

Kim Y, Kim S, Kim S. An integrated agent-based simulation modeling framework for sustainable production of an Agrophotovoltaic system. Journal of Cleaner Production, 2023; 420: 138307.

Nongnet. Sales price in whole sale markets. https://www.nongnet.or.kr/front/M000000197/content/view.do?pumCd=0806. Accessed on [2023-08-14].

Junos M H, Mohd Khairuddin A S, Thannirmalai S, Dahari M. An optimized YOLO‐based object detection model for crop harvesting system. IET Image Processing, 2021; 15(9): 2112–2125.

Tian Y, Yang G, Wang Z, Wang H, Li E, Liang Z. Apple detection during different growth stages in orchards using the improved YOLO-V3 model. Computers and Electronics in Agriculture, 2019; 157: 417–426.

Wang X, Liu J. Tomato anomalies detection in greenhouse scenarios based on YOLO-Dense. Frontiers in Plant Science, 2021; 12: 634103.

Kaur D, Kaur Y. Various image segmentation techniques: A review. International Journal of Computer Science and Mobile Computing, 2014; 3(5): 809–814.

Xiang, R. Image segmentation for whole tomato plant recognition at night. Computers and Electronics in Agriculture, 2018; 154: 434–442.

Downloads

Published

2025-10-27

How to Cite

Lim, H., Kim, Y., Kim, S., & Kim, S. (2025). Convolutional Neural Network (CNN)-based transfer learning framework for cherry tomato production. International Journal of Agricultural and Biological Engineering, 18(5), 90–101. https://doi.org/10.25165/ijabe.v18i5.9827

Issue

Section

Animal, Plant and Facility Systems