AI used to identify sweetness of melons at a store in Hainan

At a muskmelon store in Haikou in Hainan Province, customers can use artificial intelligence technology to measure the sweetness of the melons on offer, reports thepaper.cn.

Information about the sweetness of a muskmelon is displayed on a customer's smartphone at a melon store in Haikou, the capital of south China's Hainan Province, on October 10, 2018. [Photo: VCG]

Each muskmelon on display has its own certificate that indicates its level of sweetness, ranging from 90 percent, to 70 percent, to half-ripe. The measure of sweetness listed on the certificate is based on an AI-assisted add-on inside the popular Alipay payment app. Customers can upload a picture of a melon into the Alipay add-on, which then provides a report about its sweetness and ripeness.

A customer scans a muskmelon with her smartphone to measure its sweetness at a store in Haikou, the capital of south China's Hainan Province, on October 10, 2018. [Photo: VCG]

Developed by Aliyun, Alibaba's cloud computing and AI subsidiary, the Alipay add-on relies on an AI algorithm trained on more than 150,000 pictures of muskmelons with differing levels of ripeness. Its accuracy is said to be above 90 percent.

Jiang Linbo, the owner of the melon store, said that classifying melons according to their sweetness helps to match the fruit to the customer's tastes. "I think agriculture can be high-end, and I always thought AI technology should be combined with agriculture," he said.