Color or Shape of Fruit

There are all kinds of reasons why it would be great if, for example, an orchardist could get a count of, again, for example, the number of apples on his tree way before the fruit matured. You can understand that sitting and counting tiny green fruit against a green leaf background would be tedious and fraught with errors. That is where Northwest Nazarene University Professor Dr. Duke Bulanon has stepped in with camera technology designed to identify these early fruits by examining the wavelength of their color which is very tricky. I had a question for Dr. Bulanon. "With the camera and the wavelength, why do you attempt to go by color, why wouldn't it be by shape? Is there not some sort of shaping algorithm? There are different ways of approaching the problem and that is one way. Looking at the, it’s not really color, but more on the spectral reflection because when you say color, you are limited to 400 nm to 700 nm which is what our eyes can see. Beyond that, you have the infrared and below that you have the ultraviolet which our eyes could not detect. So we have these special sensors that can detect this particular wavelength and we go by the wavelength first because that is the easier approach. If that turns out to be too difficult or if it could be found but the camera is so expensive, then we will go to the shape approach. So we go by color first and then if color doesn't really work then we try to develop software that will find circular shapes.