Prediction of Walnut Mass Based on Physical Attributes by Artificial Neural Network (ANN)

Several researchers have investigated the relationships among different physical attributes of the fruits. For proper design and operation of grading systems, important relationships among the mass and other properties of fruits such as length, width, thickness, arithmetic mean diameter, geometric mean diameter, sphericity, surface area, volume, projected area, shape index, aspect ratio and elongations must be known. Recent researches have focused on artificial neural network (ANN) approaches to predict hard-to-find attributes of the fruits from easily-determined and readily available values. In this study, Modular Neural Network (MNN) and Radial Basis Neural Network (RBNN) structures of Artificial Neural Network (ANN) were employed to predict walnut mass from the physical attributes of the walnuts. Root mean square errors (RMSE) of MNN structure ranged from 0.60 to 0.89, while RMSE of RBNN structure were found to be very low (0.0002) in all of walnut varieties. These results showed that RBNN structures of Artificial Neural Network could potentially be used to estimate mass of walnuts and various physical attributes of walnuts were sufficient to predict the mass characteristics of a walnut.