Construction of apricot variety search engine based on deep learning

Apricot has a long history of cultivation and has many varieties and types. The traditional variety identification methods are time-consuming and labor-consuming, posing grand challenges to apricot resource management. Tool development in this regard will help researchers quickly identify variety information. This study photographed apricot fruits outdoors and indoors and constructed a dataset that can precisely classify the fruits using a U-net model (F-score: 99%), which helps to obtain the fruit's size, shape, and color features. Meanwhile, a variety search engine was constructed, which can search and identify variety from the database according to the above features. Besides, a mobile and web application (ApricotView) was developed, and the construction mode can be also applied to other varieties of fruit trees. Additionally, we have collected four difficult-to-identify seed datasets and used the VGG16 model for training, with an accuracy of 97%, which provided an important basis for ApricotView. To address the difficulties in data collection bottlenecking apricot phenomics research, we developed the first apricot database platform of its kind (ApricotDIAP, http://apricotdiap.com/) to accumulate, manage, and publicize scientific data of apricot.