Using Vis/NIR Diffuse Transmittance Spectroscopy and Multivariate Analysis to Predicate Soluble Solids Content of Apple

Abstract

The objectives of this research were to compare the effect of different fruit orientations on the quality of acquired spectra and to provide a suitable calibration model for further online determination of soluble solids content (SSC) of “Fuji” apples using visible and near-infrared (Vis/NIR) diffuse transmittance. The diffuse transmittance spectra between 650 and 910 nm were collected with the designed spectrum measurement system in two fruit orientations: stem-calyx axis horizontal (T1) and stem-calyx axis vertical (T2). Area change rate (ACR) was used to evaluate the stability of spectra collected in two fruit orientations. Results showed that the fruit orientation T1 was better for our designed spectrum measurement system. Then, the performance of partial least squares (PLS) models based on spectral data after the pretreatment of several preprocessing methods was analyzed and compared. Finally, the modified competitive adaptive reweighted sampling (MCARS), successive projection algorithm (SPA), and their combination were investigated to select the effective variables for the determination of SSC. It concluded that the MCARS-SPA-PLS model based on the spectra after preprocessing of Savitzky-Golay (SG) smoothing achieved better results for SSC prediction. The correlation coefficients between measured and predicted SSC were 0.962 and 0.946, and the root mean square errors were 0.510 and 0.527°Brix for calibration and prediction set, respectively. Moreover, the physicochemical properties of 27 variables selected by MCARS-SPA were discussed to obtain a better interpretation of the calibration model. The overall results indicated that the designed diffuse transmittance spectrum measurement system together with the PLS calibration model with 27 effective variables selected by MCARS-SPA method had a potential application for online SSC detection of apple.