Comparative study of Vis/NIR reflectance and transmittance method for on-line detection of strawberry SSC

Abstract

Strawberry, as a fragile and vulnerable fruit, the realization of automatic sorting is conducive to improve the intelligent level of strawberry industry and improve the ability of product quality management. An on-line soluble solids content (SSC) detection prototype which can protect the strawberry from mechanical damage was researched and developed. The reflectance and transmittance of visible and near infrared (Vis/NIR) spectra were acquired by the prototype respectively, and the performances of the two spectra on the SSC detection performance of strawberry were compared. Four feature selection algorithms like competitive adaptive reweighted sampling (CARS) ware used for reflectance and transmittance spectra to reduce the spectra complexity, improve the strawberry SSC detection accuracy and optimize the running time of the prototype. The comparison showed that the transmittance spectra can reflect the internal SSC information of strawberry better. Then the results of feature variable selection showed that strawberry transmittance spectra combined with CARS algorithm achieved the best result of SSC prediction, and the prediction correlation coefficient (Rp) was 0.928, the root mean square error of prediction (RMSEP) was 0.412 °Brix, and the residual predictive deviation (RPD) value was 2.670. The CARS-PLS model for reflectance spectra also obtained the optimization result in the reflectance group, but its Rp, RMSEP and RPD value was 0.812, 0.587 °Brix and 1.670 respectively, which still did not meet the reliability of application. The results demonstrated that the Vis/NIR transmittance spectra have great application potential in strawberry on-line internal quality detection.