Data processing approaches and strategies for non-destructive fruits quality inspection and authentication: a review

Abstract

Fruit quality inspection and authentication instruments are the essential requirement at the different stages of fruit processing industries from harvesting to market. In recent years, various intelligent analytical methods such as electronic nose, gas chromatography and mass spectroscopy, UV–Vis–NIR spectroscopy, machine vision, hyperspectral imaging and many more have been evolved to access the fruit quality at different stages such as maturity judgement of an on-tree fruit, shelf life measurement of harvested fruit, other quality parameters measurement of various fruit products at processing industries etc. Information extracted from various analytical methods needs to be processed using different data processing approaches and strategies, which plays the major role to bring the intelligence in the analytical instruments. Although, highly promising results have been reported to process data acquired from similar type of sensory panel (gas sensor array in electronic nose) and single sensing technique (impedance measurement) but still there are several challenges to process data acquired from multiple sensing techniques fusion (similar or complementary in nature) to predict better informative results. Recently, there is a growing interest in the direction of multiple sensing techniques fusion to extract better information from fruit samples in a reliable manner and also in less time. This paper presents an extensive review of classical and modern data processing approaches and strategies that have been used for single and multiple non-destructive sensing methods in the area of fruit quality inspection and authentication. Various approaches and strategies for preprocessing, data fusion, feature extraction, model design, multi-modal data processing, training, testing and validation for single and multiple sensing techniques have been briefly explained in the presented review. The presented review also discusses the need, scope, and challenges of data processing methods for multiple sensing techniques fusion. Different commercially available handheld and lab level analytical instruments also have been reviewed based on their intelligence, complexity and quality parameters prediction.