FFIS: Design and Development of a Domestic Fruit Freshness Recognition System

INTRODUCTION: In everyday households, fruits are often stored for too long, forgotten, or discarded early due to uncertainty about their freshness, leading to avoidable waste, unnecessary cost, and suboptimal dietary habits. A reliable and user-centered fresh produce assessment tool can help people establish a healthier and more sustainable lifestyle. The existing freshness assessment systems are mainly designed for industrial or laboratory environments and rarely meet the privacy, stability and cost requirements of family digital health products. OBJECTIVES: This study aims to design and evaluate an edge-AI system that jointly recognizes fruit category and ordinal freshness stage in real kitchens, providing a reproducible benchmark for household-oriented freshness sensing rather than a one-off engineering prototype. METHODS: We develop the Fruit Freshness Identification System (FFIS), a lightweight multi-task detector built on YOLO11n with a BiFPN neck, ACmix hybrid attention, and an IoU-based localization loss reweighted for partial occlusion. A kitchen-scene dataset is collected and stratified by household, countertop material, lighting, and clutter. The system is trained with an ordinal regression head for freshness staging and evaluated on COCO-style detection metrics, stage-wise classification metrics, and edge-device throughput and energy consumption. RESULTS: On the FFIS-Fruit test split, FFIS achieves an mAP@0.5:0.95 of 62.4 ± 0.4, mAP@0.5 of 94.1 ± 0.3, and recall of 90.8 ± 0.3, outperforming lightweight YOLO baselines as well as a two-stage detector-plus-classifier pipeline. Warm-LED and glossy-countertop subsets show consistent gains in high-reflection scenarios. On-device experiments reach ~55 FPS (INT8) on Jetson Orin Nano and ~10 FPS on Raspberry Pi 5 under a unified evaluation protocol. CONCLUSION: FFIS provides a household-oriented, privacy-preserving reference implementation for kitchen fruit monitoring, demonstrating that single-pass multi-task detection can meet domestic deployment constraints on low-cost hardware. Rather than directly claiming reductions in household food waste, the findings establish a technical foundation for integrating freshness signals into downstream digital-health workflows such as waste-aware reminders and dietary planning.