Developing a Colorimetric Equation and a Colorimetric Model to Create a Smartphone Application That Identifies the Ripening Stage of Lady Finger Bananas in Thailand

This article develops a colorimetric equation and a colorimetric model to create a smartphone application that identifies the ripening stage of the lady finger banana (LFB) (Musa AA group ‘Kluai Khai’, กล้วยไข่ “gluay kai” in Thai). The mobile application photographs an LFB, automatically analyzes the color of the banana, and tells the user the number of days until the banana ripens and the number of days the banana will remain edible. The application is called the Automatic Banana Ripeness Indicator (ABRI, pronounced like “Aubrey”), and the rapid analysis that it provides is useful to anyone involved in the storage and distribution of bananas. The colorimetric equation interprets the skin color with the CIE L*a*b* color model in conjunction with the Pythagorean theorem. The colorimetric model has three parts. First, COCO-SSD object detection locates and identifies the banana in the image. Second, the Automatic Power-Law Transformation, developed here, adjusts the illumination to a standard derived from the average of a set of laboratory images. After removing the image background and converting the image to L*a*b*, the data are sent to the colorimetric equation to calculate the ripening stage. Results show that ABRI correctly detects a banana with 91.45% accuracy and the Automatic Power-Law Transformation correctly adjusts the image illumination with 95.72% accuracy. The colorimetric equation correctly identifies the ripening stage of all incoming images. ABRI is thus an accurate and robust tool that quickly, conveniently, and reliably provides the user with any LFB’s ripening stage and the remaining days for consumption.