Identification of Bruise and Fungi Contamination in Strawberries Using Hyperspectral Imaging Technology and Multivariate Analysis

Mechanical bruise and fungi contamination are two typical defective features for strawberries, resulting in quick quality deterioration of the strawberries during transportation and storage. In this work, the approach of combined image processing with spectra analysis was successfully developed to identify defective strawberries (bruised and fungal infected) using hyperspectral reflectance imaging system. Hyperspectral image data was exploited by minimum noise fraction (MNF) transformation for strawberry defects distinguished by combining thresholding and morphology procedures, and defective regions were located and separated for spectra extracting. The linkages between quality parameters and spectra features were established based on the target defective regions of the fruit. After spectra normalization, three different spectral regions (400 to 600 nm, 650 to 720 nm, and 900 to 1010 nm) were identified for healthy, bruised, or infected strawberries, and eight optimal wavelengths were selected by the successive projection algorithms (SPA) from the whole range of wavelengths. Both linear and non-linear algorithms were developed to identify defective types in strawberries. The results indicated that based on full wavelengths, SVM model performed the highest overall identification accuracy, with the accuracy of 96.91% for calibration and 92.59% for prediction of the fruit. This work shows that hyperspectral reflectance imaging technology has the potential for identifying defective strawberries and provides theoretical basis for the development of online classification of different defected fruits.