Multi-class fruit classification using RGB-D data for indoor robots

In this paper we present an effective and robust system to classify fruits under varying pose and lighting conditions tailored for an object recognition system on a mobile platform. Therefore, we present results on the effectiveness of our underlying segmentation method using RGB as well as depth cues for the specific technical setup of our robot. A combination of RGB low-level visual feature descriptors and 3D geometric properties is used to retrieve complementary object information for the classification task. The unified approach is validated using two multi-class RGB-D fruit categorization datasets. Experimental results compare different feature sets and classification methods and highlight the effectiveness of the proposed features using a Random Forest classifier.