TITLE: Protocol To Access Produce Images from the Imperfect Foods Dataverse on the Harvard Dataverse
AUTHORS: Anjali Sharma

[DESCRIPTION]
In the face of the impending challenge of feeding a growing global population, one-third of all food produced ends up as waste. A notable contributor to this problem is the wastage of a third of perfectly edible and nutritious fresh produce because they do not meet the high cosmetic standards expected by consumers. Eliminating this wastage of imperfect produce is therefore a crucial and sustainable means to increase food supply for a growing global population. This can be achieved through automated sorting of good, bad and imperfect produce using automation , robotics and machine vision. A prerequisite for such automated sorting are fast and accurate machine vision algorithms for successful differentiation between good, bad and imperfect produce. Training such algorithms requires large image datasets. While much work has gone into collecting images of good and bad produce, to the best of our knowledge, no such dataset exists for imperfect produce items. To fill this gap I have curated a dataset of good, bad, and imperfect produce items for a wide variety of fruits and vegetables. At this time of writing of this version of the protocol, images have been collected for just over 30 produce items and new ones are continuously being added. The dataset has been made publicly available on the Harvard Dataverse for use in training machine vision algorithms for sorting good, bad, and imperfect produce. It is our hope that this open dataset will contribute to improving research and practice for sorting and saving of imperfect produce in the food supply chain.

In this protocol, we provide instructions on how to access these images for interested researchers and practitioners.

[STEPS]
SECTION: Introduction
1. The produce images are stored in the imperferct foods dataverse (IFDverse) on the Harvard Dataverse. Decide on whether to search for produce on Harvard Dataverse, OR to use the link included in the annotated bibliography of the IFDverse.
SECTION: Find Dataset for Produce and Type of Produce in Imperfect Foods Dataverse (IFDverse)
2. Go to desired produce item and type of produce  - Good, Bad or Imperfect.
3. Start a browser on your computing device and type in the following URL(Uniform Resource Locator) address :   https://dataverse.harvard.edu/
4. Confirm that you see the Harvard Dataverse home page similar to the one shown here.


 

5. Type in "Imperfect Foods" in the search bar and click on search button, as shown in the image below.

 

6. In the search results that you get, you should get the "Imperfect Foods Dataverse" as one result, as shown in image below. Click on the 'Imperfect Foods Dataverse' Link.

 


7. Confirm that the link takes you to the following screen and make the following checks on the screen:
7.1. Check#1: Check that the Imperfect Foods Dataverse is shown at top of the screen.

 

7.2. Check#2: Check for the number of dataverse and datasets. The number of dataverse is 33 and the number of datasets is 92 at the time of this writing. As more produce items get added, the number of dataverses and datasets will increase. These numbers will be updated in later versions of this protocol.

 

7.3. Check#3 Check to view individual images of produce items. To do that check the 'Files' box and uncheck the 'Dataverse' and 'Datasets' boxes as shown in the image below. This will display a listing of produce images.

 


SECTION: Find Dataset for Produce and Type of Produce in Imperfect Foods Dataverse
3. First go to the annotated bibliography that contains the list of produce item datasets. The bibliography is available online at https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/9JPXD. , and is also attached herewith this step.
  

SECTION: Find Dataset for Produce and Type of Produce in Imperfect Foods Dataverse
4. Go to the Table 1 on page 2 of the annotated bibliography and locate the produce item and the type of produce item for which you want to acquire images. An image of the Table is attached herewith this step. Click on the link in the 'Ref' column in the list. This will take you to the citation for that dataset.
 

SECTION: Find Dataset for Produce and Type of Produce in Imperfect Foods Dataverse
5. The annotated bibliography contains citations for each of the datasets. The citations contain a DOI for the dataset that is maintained persistently. This is shown in the image attached herewith this step. Click on the DOI link of the desired dataset to be taken directly to the dataset within the Imperfect foods dataverse.
 

SECTION: Download images for Produce and Type of Produce from Imperfect Foods Dataverse
9. Look carefully at the image dataset page. Check out the various features of the dataset that have been highlighted in the attached image.
 

8. Browse and click on the produce dataset for which you wish to acquire images. This will take you to the dataset within the Harvard Dataverse.
SECTION: Download Produce Images
10. To Download a specific image click on the download button icon as shown in image below.

 

SECTION: Download Produce Images
11. Check for downloaded image in your downloads folder.