Detection of Ripeness in Oil Palm Fresh Fruit Bunches Using the YOLO12S Algorithm on Digital Images

Indonesia is the world's largest producer of palm oil, with a production volume reaching 46.82 million tons in 2022. This industry heavily relies on the quality of Fresh Fruit Bunches (FFB) harvests, which is determined by the accuracy of ripeness at the time of harvest. Unfortunately, ripeness assessment of FFB is still conducted manually and subjectively by field workers, posing risks to both efficiency and production accuracy. Although various studies have employed YOLOv5 and YOLOv8 for fruit ripeness detection, few have explored the potential of YOLO12s in classifying FFB ripeness in a comprehensive and efficient manner. In this study, we present the application of the YOLO12s algorithm to automatically classify the ripeness levels of oil palm FFB using digital images. The YOLO12s model was trained on 14,620 FFB images categorized into four ripeness levels: unripe, under-ripe, ripe, and overripe. Evaluation results showed a precision of 93.1%, recall of 95.9%, [email protected] of 97.8%, and [email protected]–0.95 of 78.8%. The model was able to perform inference in approximately 4.7 milliseconds per image and demonstrated good generalization despite challenges related to varying lighting conditions. These results indicate that YOLO12s holds great potential to replace subjective manual methods with a more accurate, consistent, and efficient classification solution to support the harvesting process in the palm oil industry.