Deep Learning Model for the Inspection of Coffee Bean Defects

The detection of coffee bean defects is the most crucial step prior to bean roasting. Existing defect detection methods used in the specialty coffee bean industry entail manual screening and sorting, require substantial human resources, and are not standardized. To solve these problems, this study developed a deep learning algorithm to detect defects in coffee beans. The results reveal that when the pooling layer was used to enhance features and reduce neural dimensionality, some of the coffee been features were lost or misclassified. Therefore, a novel dimensionality reduction method was adopted to increase the ability of feature extraction. The developed model also overcame the drawbacks of padding causing blurred image boundaries and the dead neurons causing impeding feature propagation. Images of eight types of coffee beans were used to train and test the proposed detection model. The proposed method was verified to reduce the bias when classifying defects in coffee beans. The detection accuracy rate of the proposed model was 95.2%. When the model was only used to detect the presence of defects, the accuracy rate increased to 100%. Thus, the proposed model is highly accurate in coffee bean defect detection in the classification of eight types of coffee beans.