deepNIR: Datasets for generating synthetic NIR images and improved fruit detection system using deep learning techniques

This paper presents datasets utilised for synthetic near-infrared (NIR) image generation and bounding-box level fruit detection systems. It is undeniable that high-calibre machine learning frameworks such as Tensorflow or Pytorch, and large-scale ImageNet or COCO datasets with the aid of accelerated GPU hardware have pushed the limit of machine learning techniques for more than decades. Among these breakthroughs, a high-quality dataset is one of the essential building blocks that can lead to success in model generalisation and the deployment of data-driven deep neural networks. In particular, synthetic data generation tasks often require more training samples than other supervised approaches. Therefore, in this paper, we share the NIR+RGB datasets that are re-processed from two public datasets (i.e., nirscene and SEN12MS) and our novel NIR+RGB sweet pepper(capsicum) dataset. We quantitatively and qualitatively demonstrate that these NIR+RGB datasets are sufficient to be used for synthetic NIR image generation. We achieved Frechet Inception Distance (FID) of 11.36, 26.53, and 40.15 for nirscene1, SEN12MS, and sweet pepper datasets respectively. In addition, we release manual annotations of 11 fruit bounding boxes that can be exported as various formats using cloud service. Four newly added fruits [blueberry, cherry, kiwi, and wheat] compound 11 novel bounding box datasets on top of our previous work presented in the deepFruits project [apple, avocado, capsicum, mango, orange, rockmelon, strawberry]. The total number of bounding box instances of the dataset is 162k and it is ready to use from cloud service. For the evaluation of the dataset, Yolov5 single stage detector is exploited and reported impressive mean-average-precision,mAP[0.5:0.95] results of[min:0.49, max:0.812]. We hope these datasets are useful and serve as a baseline for the future studies.