Predicting the quality attributes related to geographical growing regions in red-fleshed kiwifruit by data fusion of electronic nose and computer vision systems

Abstract

The ability of a data fusion system composed of a computer vision system (CVS) and an electronic nose (e-nose) was evaluated to predict key physiochemical attributes and distinguish red-fleshed kiwifruit produced in three distinct regions in northern Iran. Color and morphological features from whole and middle-cut kiwifruits, along with the maximum responses of the 13 metal oxide semiconductor (MOS) sensors of an e-nose system, were used as inputs to the data fusion system. Principal component analysis (PCA) revealed that the first two principal components (PCs) extracted from the e-nose features could effectively differentiate kiwifruit samples from different regions. The PCA-SVM algorithm achieved a 93.33% classification rate for kiwifruits from three regions based on data from individual e-nose and CVS. Data fusion increased the classification rate of the SVM model to 100% and improved the performance of Support Vector Regression (SVR) for predicting physiochemical indices of kiwifruits compared to individual systems. The data fusion-based PCA-SVR models achieved validation R2 values ranging from 90.17% for the Brix-Acid Ratio (BAR) to 98.57% for pH prediction. These results demonstrate the high potential of fusing artificial visual and olfactory systems for quality monitoring and identifying the geographical growing regions of kiwifruits.