International Journal of Computing and Digital Systems ISSN (2210-142X) Int. J. Com. Dig. Sys. 13, No.1 (Jan-2023) http://dx.doi.org/10.12785/ijcds/130114 FruVegy: An Android App for the Automatic Identification of Fruits and Vegetables using Computer Vision and Machine Learning Anish Appadoo 1 , Yashna Gopaul 1 and Sameerchand Pudaruth 1 1 Department of Information and Communication Technologies, University of Mauritius, Reduit, Mauritius Received 31 Dec. 2021, Revised 23 Jun. 2022, Accepted 12 Jan. 2023, Published 31 Jan. 2023 Abstract: Nowadays, many people are unaware of the benefits of fruits and vegetables which has resulted in their reduced consumption. This has inevitably led to a rise in diseases such as obesity, high blood pressure and heart diseases. To this end, we have developed FruVegy which is an android app which can automatically identify fruits and vegetables and then display its nutritional values. The app can identify forty different fruits/vegetables. The app is specially targeting school students who will find it easy and fun to use and this, we believe, will increase their interest in the consumption of fruits and vegetables. Furthermore, the names of the fruits and vegetables are also available in French and in Mauritian Creole. Our dataset consists of 1600 images from 40 different fruits and vegetables. There was an equal number of images for each fruit/vegetable. To our knowledge, this is the largest dataset that currently exists in literature. Features such as shape, colour and texture were extracted from each image. Different machine learning classifiers were tested but random forest with 100 trees produced the best result with an accuracy of 90.6%. However, with TensorFlow, an average accuracy of 98.1% was obtained under different scenarios. In the future, we intend we increase our dataset and the number of features in order to achieve an even higher accuracy. Keywords: fruits; vegetables; identification; mobile app; machine learning; computer vision. 1. Introduction Fruits and vegetables act as a protector against several diseases and prevent the onset of medical conditions such as diabetes, high blood pressure and heart diseases. Because of our hectic lives, many people often tend to neglect their health, by ignoring what they consume, even though a proper diet can simply be supplemented by fruits and vegetables [1]. According to the World Health Organization (WHO, unhealthy diets are one of the leading causes of non-communicable diseases [2]. Furthermore, we have noticed that there is an absence of m-Health tools in Mauritius. Thus, the development of a fruits and vegetables recognition application will be beneficial for the public in general. To target the maximum number of users, the app will be developed for the Android platform. On a global scale, more than 80% of smartphone users have a Samsung device and this is also the trend in Mauritius. It is also trite law in Mauritius that the majority of students in secondary schools have a smartphone and most students in primary schools know how to use a smartphone or tablet. They know how to access the internet, watch videos from YouTube, listen to their favourite songs and music and how to download and install games and other apps from Google Play. Thus, the main aim of this work is to develop an Android-based fruits and vegetables identification system which will allow a user to capture a picture and then launch the automatic identification system which is based on artificial intelligence techniques. Once the produce is identified, its name will be displayed in the most commonly used languages in Mauritius which are English, French and Mauritius Creole. The properties and the health benefits will also be displayed. The application is intended to be very simple to use. Moreover, FruVegy will not require an internet connection to function. The application also does not require high resolution images to provide high accuracy. Any Android phone equipped with a camera can be used. This work has made several contributions. Firstly, our system makes use of 40 categories of fruits and vegetables which is the largest number of categories that have been used so far. Secondly, our system has the highest accuracy E-mail address: anish.appadoo@umail.uom.ac.mu, yashna.gopaul1@umail.uom.ac.mu, s.pudaruth@uom.ac.mu http:// journals.uob.edu.bh