E-CLIP: An Enhanced CLIP-Based Visual Language Model for Fruit Detection and Recognition

With the progress of agricultural modernization, intelligent fruit harvesting is gaining importance. While fruit detection and recognition are essential for robotic harvesting, existing methods suffer from limited generalizability, including adapting to complex environments and handling new fruit varieties. This problem stems from their reliance on unimodal visual data, which creates a semantic gap between image features and contextual understanding. To solve these issues, this study proposes a multi-modal fruit detection and recognition framework based on visual language models (VLMs). By integrating multi-modal information, the proposed model enhances robustness and generalization across diverse environmental conditions and fruit types. The framework accepts natural language instructions as input, facilitating effective human–machine interaction. Through its core module, Enhanced Contrastive Language–Image Pre-Training (E-CLIP), which employs image–image and image–text contrastive learning mechanisms, the framework achieves robust recognition of various fruit types and their maturity levels. Experimental results demonstrate the excellent performance of the model, achieving an F1 score of 0.752, and an mAP@0.5 of 0.791. The model also exhibits robustness under occlusion and varying illumination conditions, attaining a zero-shot mAP@0.5 of 0.626 for unseen fruits. In addition, the system operates at an inference speed of 54.82 FPS, effectively balancing speed and accuracy, and shows practical potential for smart agriculture. This research provides new insights and methods for the practical application of smart agriculture.