Advances in Recognition Methods for Fruit and Vegetable Harvesting

Abstract

The harvesting of fruit and vegetable crops has long been plagued by prominent issues such as high labor costs, low harvesting efficiency, and high fruit damage rates. The application of object recognition technology has enabled harvesting robots to identify, detect, and locate crops in certain agricultural scenarios, achieving a degree of automated harvesting. However, these systems still suffer from shortcomings such as poor robustness in complex environments, insufficient generalization ability, and high model deployment costs, which significantly limit their large-scale application in agricultural harvesting equipment. This paper comprehensively reviews recent literature in the field of fruit and vegetable target recognition. It summarizes how current research focuses on the implementation principles and directions for the improvement of mainstream methods—including digital image processing, traditional machine learning, and deep learning—while also identifying the remaining issues and challenges facing current technology in terms of algorithmic model real-time performance, robustness, and generalization ability. In the future, target recognition technology is expected to achieve breakthroughs through approaches such as multimodal feature fusion, large-scale models, and semi-supervised learning, evolving toward higher accuracy, faster processing speeds, and easier deployment, thereby providing technical support for the large-scale implementation of smart agriculture.