Effect of spectral measurement orientation on online prediction of soluble solids content of apple using Vis/NIR diffuse reflectance

Abstract

The effect of variation of fruit orientation on online prediction of soluble solids content (SSC) of ‘Fuji’ apples based on visible and near-infrared (Vis/NIR) spectroscopy was studied. The diffuse reflectance spectra in 550–950 nm were collected with a designed online system in six orientations: stem-calyx axis vertical with stem upward (T1) and stem downward (T5), 45° between stem-calyx axis and horizontal with stem slope upward (T2) and stem slope downward (T4), stem-calyx axis horizontal with stem towards computer side lights (T3), stem-calyx axis horizontal with stem towards belt movement direction (T6). The 180 samples with SSC range of 8.00–13.60°Brix were divided into 135 of calibration set with 1.09 standard deviation (S.D.) and 45 of prediction set with 0.85 S.D. The signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and area change rate (ACR) were used to evaluate the stability of collected spectra. After the comparison of different preprocessing methods, partial least squares (PLS) and least squares-support vector machine (LS-SVM) were used to develop compensation models of SSC for each orientation separately (local models) and all orientations (global model), respectively. Finally, competitive adaptive reweighted sampling (CARS), successive projection algorithm (SPA), and their combination were used to select the effective wavelengths (EWs), respectively. Results showed that T1 performed better for our system and influence of measurement orientation on spectra greatly affected SSC prediction accuracy. Comparatively, global model was insensitive to fruit orientation variation. 37 EWs selected by CARS-SPA-PLS model after Savitzky-Golay smoothing in all orientations achieved better results with rp and RMSEP of 0.815, 0.818, 0.837, 0.731, 0.807, 0.842 and 0.487, 0.484, 0.460, 0.573, 0.497, 0.453°Brix, respectively. Generally, global model with EWs could be promisingly used for online SSC prediction of apple.