<![CDATA[Purpose – This study aimed to develop an automated oil palm fruit maturity level detection system using the real-time detection transformer (RT-DETR) algorithm to overcome the limitations of conventional visual inspection methods, which are often subjective and inconsistent. This study evaluated the effectiveness of the RT-DETR in detecting and classifying oil palm fruit maturity levels to support quality control processes in plantation operations.Method – A computer vision-based approach was implemented using the RT-DETR-L object detection model. The dataset consisted of 14,620 annotated oil palm fruit images categorized into four maturity levels: unripe, underripe, ripe, and overripe. The research process included data collection, image annotation, preprocessing, model training, and evaluation of the model. The model performance was assessed using precision, recall, mean Average Precision (mAP@50), and inference speed metrics.Findings – The experimental results show that the RT-DETR-L model achieved a precision of 93.2%, 95.6%, and mAP@50 of 96.9%, respectively. The model successfully detected and classified oil palm fruit maturity levels across all categories with high accuracy. Furthermore, the model achieved an inference time of 25–28 ms per image and a processing speed of 10–14 FPS on an NVIDIA RTX 3050 4GB GPU, demonstrating its capability for real-time applications.Research Implications – The findings indicate that RT-DETR-L can improve the efficiency, consistency, and accuracy of oil palm fruit sorting and quality control processes. However, this study was limited to the available datasets and testing scenarios used. Future research should evaluate the model under diverse environmental conditions, lighting variations, and field deployment settings to improve its generalizability and robustness.Originality – Unlike previous studies that primarily employed CNN-based detectors or focused on binary maturity classification, this study investigated the application of a transformer-based RT-DETR-L architecture for detecting four oil palm fruit maturity categories. The results demonstrate that RT-DETR-L can provide high detection accuracy while maintaining real-time performance in smart agriculture applications.]]>
