Development of Strawberry Harvest Support System Using Smart Glasses
Jin Yien Lee, Taiga Eguchi, Nanami Ishizu, Tatsuya Kawakami, Wen Liang Yeoh, Hiroshi Okumura, Osamu Fukuda
Abstract
The strawberry industry faces significant chal- lenges such as harvest inefficiency and inconsistent quality due to labor shortages and reliance on inexperienced workers. One factor contributing to this is the lack of quantified criteria for strawberry harvesting decisions. In this study, we propose a harvest support system that uses smart glasses as a medium to provide real-time feedback on quantified ripeness and size information through computer vision technology. In the exper- iment, we compared the efficiency and accuracy of harvesting between cases where humans made harvesting decisions alone and cases where they were supported by the developed system to verify the usefulness of the developed system. The results showed that the system improved the harvesting speed by 17%, the accuracy of size evaluation by 25% and ripeness evaluation by 8% compared to the case where only human judgment was used. These results suggest that this system not only improves productivity and ensures consistent quality but also is expected to increase the number of new entrants in the strawberry industry, potentially addressing the labor shortage in the strawberry sector.