New Framework for Visual Tomato Maturity Assessment in Scientific Reports: Keeping Classification Decisions Inside the Fruit Region
A study published in Scientific Reports on November 14 proposes a region-consistency constrained learning framework for assessing tomato maturity from visual appearance. The authors are based at Northeast Electric Power University in Jilin, China, across its School of Computer Science, its Library, and its School of Electrical Engineering, with Jianxun Lou as corresponding author.
Accurate tomato maturity assessment based on visual appearance is essential for quality control in agricultural production, yet remains challenging under complex visual conditions due to background clutter and ambiguous maturity cues. The authors note that many existing methods can suppress background interference to some extent, but lack explicit mechanisms to ensure that classification decisions are formed within maturity-relevant fruit regions.
The framework integrates decision-relevant regions characterized by Class Activation Maps (CAM) with saliency-based spatial priors and enforces consistency between them during training, thereby regulating where classification decisions are formed without modifying the input or intermediate feature representations.
Experiments conducted on a real-world tomato dataset demonstrate that the proposed framework consistently improves classification performance across multiple backbone architectures. Statistically significant gains are achieved without introducing additional computational cost during inference.
The authors conclude that the framework provides an effective way to enhance the reliability of visual maturity assessment under complex agricultural conditions. The article was received on January 14, 2026, accepted on October 12, 2026, and published on November 14, 2026, with the digital object identifier 10.1038/s41598-026-76301-6.
The article is published open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, and the authors declare no competing interests.
Source: Scientific
Published by GSM · USA (original Chinese edition)
Photo: 图：藤上的番茄植株，果实多尚未成熟、个别开始转红。来源：NPS, Public domain，维基共享资源。 / Photo: Tomato plants on the vine, mostly unripe with a few fruits starting to turn. Credit: NPS, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
