Abstract
Non-contact fruit sizing from RGB-D imagery reaches sub-centimetre accuracy on workstation hardware, but in-field grading requires the same pipeline to run on a low-power single-board computer, and the cost of that transition is rarely reported. We deploy a curvature-aware cucumber length-measurement pipeline (YOLO26n detection, prompt-based segmentation and a medial arc spline estimator) on an NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano and a Raspberry Pi 4, and characterize both against an RTX 3050 Ti workstation by replaying 50 identical greenhouse captures of 7 specimens, with specimen-level cluster-bootstrap statistics. Accuracy is preserved: mean absolute error (MAE) is 0.58 cm (95% CI 0.46-0.69) on both the workstation and the Jetson at matched precision, with a paired difference of zero. TensorRT FP16 compilation cuts Jetson detection latency 2.57x, giving two operating points on one board: 72 ms per fruit at 0.84 cm, or 2.74 s at 0.64 cm. Four ablations map the design space. For prompted segmentation backends, measurement accuracy is fixed by the backend and reproduces across platforms to within 0.01 cm, while its cost is fixed by the platform and varies 214x, so the two choices are separable. Whole-graph INT8 quantization of the NMS-free detection head fails structurally, returning no detections, because one output tensor carries both pixel coordinates and confidences; we show that no calibration strategy can avoid this. Excluding the head restores function at 1.37x. Energy per fruit is 42.2 J on the Jetson, and its 7 W mode consumes 73% more than its 15 W mode. The Raspberry Pi with MobileSAM costs 2.5x more per fruit than the Jetson with SAM despite drawing 47% less power, and it runs without thermal throttling under sustained load. The results define an accuracy-throughput-energy envelope with three non-dominated configurations and give rules for selecting among them.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.09490
