Fruit Sizing App

Spectre Top Down Project

By October 7, 2021 No Comments
Reading Time: 3 minutes
Truck moving under Spectre for fruit sizing

Hectre’s computer vision AI fruit sizing solution, Spectre, was created as a direct result of talking with our customers and the fruit industry, to uncover the key challenges they were facing.

We’ve been delivering excellent sample sizes, with high levels of accuracy, within seconds, and all straight from an iPad or iPhone for some time now, providing growers and packers with valuable fruit sizing data to support their critical decision making, so they can improve their pick, their storage, reduce costly packing line stoppages and provide greater confidence for their sales teams to sell their fruit.

Spectre models have now been developed for apples, oranges, lemons and mandarins, and avocadoes, pears and cherries are now well underway.

Some of our larger packhouse customers shared with us another challenge they faced. They experience large volumes of open top trucks arriving into receiving and wondered if there was a way to gain the benefits of Spectre, straight from the truck tops on arrival at the packhouse.

After investigating the process flow, and assessing the complexities, Hectre’s Spectre team took on the challenge and the Spectre Top Down project was born. Innovation steps such as Spectre Top Down, require a lot of dedication, expertise and collaboration. Identifying a simple, effective and reliable overhead camera set up, is just one of the challenges the Spectre team have overcome. (See images below)

Development at Hectre is never undertaken as a standalone – it always involves the collaboration of innovative, quality focused customers. For this project, the Spectre team have been working closely with well respected Washington fruit company, Sage Fruit. The team at Sage Fruit cleverly identified very early on, the value that Spectre Top Down could provide, and have been great supporters as Spectre Top Down was built and tested.

Hectre customer, Lake Ontario Fruit out of New York, have joined in on the final testing phase of Spectre Top Down and have also provided valuable feedback as we fine tune our models.

Now, an open-top  truck can drive under a very simple, inexpensive, camera set up, and Spectre Top Down will then use Hectre’s clever simplicity technology, to detect huge volumes of fruit samples straight off the top bins of fruit. (The video below shows a truck movement as it passes below the camera.)

Spectre Top Down Results are delivered in real time, with massive sample sizes achieved and results served up via simple to view fruit size estimation results graphs (see image below).

“We’ve been so impressed with the accuracy levels and huge sample sizes that we’ve been able to achieve with Spectre Top Down. I’m extremely proud of our small team, who have stepped up to this challenge, and have delivered this meaningful and practical technology which will have a very real and positive impact on the fruit industry, and I am very grateful for the collaborative support from Hectre customers Sage Fruit and Lake Ontario Fruit. They have been amazing,” says Luke Butters, Hectre’s R&D Manager.

Spectre Top Down - Results Graph

The project team will now continue to collect data, enhancing the Spectre Top Down model even further as it gets ready for launch…

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