Research · ML · 2023 Published on arXiv

Date Fruit Disease
Classification

A machine learning research project classifying diseases in date fruits using a custom dataset collected from local farms — combining conventional ML with deep learning approaches. Published on arXiv.

Read Paper ↗ Preprocessing Tool ↗
Year
2023
Category
ML Research
Supervisor
Dr. Ghazanfar Latif
Lab
RoboLab @ PMU

Research process

This was my first research project, conducted during an internship at RoboLab at Prince Mohammad Bin Fahd University under Dr. Ghazanfar Latif. The end-to-end process covered the full ML research pipeline:

Data collection at local farms, image capture with a Nikon D3100, preprocessing with custom Python scripts for region-of-interest extraction, feature extraction and conventional ML experiments, followed by deep learning experiments — culminating in a published arXiv paper.

Pipeline

Field data collection
Visited local farms to gather real disease samples — no synthetic or web-scraped data.
Custom preprocessing
Built a Python tool to extract regions of interest from raw images, published separately on GitHub.
Classical ML baselines
Feature extraction and conventional ML experiments to establish baselines before deep learning.
Deep learning
CNN-based classification experiments, comparing architectures and training strategies on the custom dataset.

Built with

Python TensorFlow scikit-learn OpenCV NumPy Matplotlib