Low-Cost Sensor for Lycopene Content Measurement in Tomato Based on Raspberry Pi 4.

Abstract

Measuring lycopene in tomatoes is fundamental to the agrifood industry because of its health benefits. It is one of the leading quality criteria for consuming this fruit. Traditionally, the amount determination of this carotenoid is performed using the high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) technique. This is a very reliable and accurate method, but it has several disadvantages, such as long analysis time, high cost, and destruction of the sample. In this sense, this work proposes a low-cost sensor that correlates the lycopene content in tomato with the color present in its epicarp. A Raspberry Pi 4 programmed with Python language was used to develop the lycopene prediction model. Various regression models were evaluated using neural networks, fuzzy logic, and linear regression. The best model was the fuzzy nonlinear regression as the RGB input, with a correlation of R 2 = 0.99 and a mean error of 1.9 × 10 -5 . This work was able to demonstrate that it is possible to determine the lycopene content using a digital camera and a low-cost integrated system in a non-invasive way.

Plant phenotyping relevance

トマト果皮画像の色からリコペン含量を非破壊推定する低コストセンサーと予測モデルの開発が中心であり、植物器官の形質測定法に該当する。

Code and data availability

The paper's Data Availability Statement links to a public Google Drive folder containing the data supporting the reported lycopene measurement results (tomato RGB/L*a*b* image-derived measurements and HPLC-calibrated model data). No separate code deposit is described; the models were built in MATLAB toolboxes without a