FRESHNets: Highly Accurate and Efficient Food Freshness Assessment Based on Deep Convolutional Neural Networks

Food freshness classification is a growing concern in the food industry, mainly to protect consumer health and prevent illness and poisoning from consuming spoiled food. Intending to take a significant step towards improving food safety and quality control measures in the industry, this study presents two models based on deep learning for the classification of fruit and vegetable freshness: a robust model and an efficient model. Models’ performance evaluation shows remarkable results; in terms of accuracy, the robust model and the efficient model achieved 97.6% and 94.0% respectively, while in terms of Area Under the Curve (AUC) score, both models achieved more than 99%, with the difference in inference time between each model over 844 images being 13 seconds.