Classification and Shelf Life Prediction of Bananas Using Thermal Imaging with Vision Transformer and Random Forest

Classifying and predicting banana shelf life is vital for optimizing storage and distribution in agriculture. Traditional methods, relying on subjective visual inspection, are inconsistent and time-intensive. This study presents a new, non-destructive approach combining thermal imaging, and machine learning to classify naturally ripened and artificially ripened bananas and forecast their shelf life. Preprocessed thermal images are flattened, segmented into fixed-size patches, and then linearly projected into feature tokens. Position embeddings are incorporated to retain spatial information, and the sequence is processed by a Vision Transformer (ViT) encoder, which leverages self-attention mechanisms to model relationships between patches. The [CLS] token output is subsequently processed through fully connected layers for final classification, achieving 97.59% accuracy. Validation using t-SNE visualization demonstrated clear class separability, and receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves confirmed robust performance. With an MSE of 0.10, MAE of 0.18, and R2 score of 0.85, the random forest algorithm performed exceptionally well at predicting the shelf life of artificially ripened bananas. This approach offers significant advantages, including improved accuracy, reduced subjectivity, and efficiency in data processing. By integrating thermal imaging with advanced models, the proposed method enhances agricultural supply chain management and promotes precision in ripening classification and shelf life prediction.