Hyperspectral technology and machine learning models to estimate the fruit quality parameters of mango and strawberry crops.

Abstract

Using chemical laboratory procedures to estimate the fruit quality parameters (biochemical parameters) of mango "Succarri" and strawberry "Florida" as indicators of ripening degrees in a large area presents challenges such as low throughput, labor intensity, time consumption, and the need for multiple samples. So, using spectral reflectance-based proximal remote sensing to quickly and accurately measure biochemical parameters in different fruits is important to find the best time to harvest, make food ripen faster, and the processing of food easier. This has significant economic and ecological advantages. The objective of this study was to evaluate the biochemical parameters of mango and strawberry fruits at various ripening stages. This was done by utilizing a combination of established and newly developed spectral reflectance indices (SRIs) in conjunction with machine learning (ML) models, including artificial neural networks (ANN), random forests (RF), and decision trees (DT). For mango fruit, the parameters estimated were chlorophyll content, total soluble solids (TSS), and firmness, whereas for strawberry fruit, the parameters were L*, b*, TSS, and firmness. These results revealed significant differences in SRI values across various ripening stages, indicating variances in the fruit's biochemical parameters. The newly developed SRIs showed superior efficacy in evaluating these parameters. The integration of SRIs with diverse ML models proved to be a successful strategy for precisely estimating biochemical parameters. For mango's biochemical parameter prediction, the ANN models demonstrated R2 values ranging from 0.92 to 1.00 and from 0.93 to 0.98 for training and testing, respectively. On the other hand, the RF models exhibited R2 values ranging from 0.98 to 1.00 and from 0.93 to 0.99 during training and testing, respectively. The DT models showed high performance, with R2 values ranging from 0.95 to 1.00 and from 0.88 to 0.99 for the training and testing phases. For strawberry's biochemical parameter prediction, the ANN models achieved R2 values between 0.75 and 0.91 and between 0.58 and 0.91 during training and testing phases, respectively. On the other hand, RF models showed R2 values between 0.85 and 0.91 during training and between 0.74 and 0.86 during testing. The DT models demonstrated excellent results, with R2 values ranging from 0.75 to 0.91 for the training set and 0.74 to 0.81 for the testing set. It can be concluded that combining SRIs with ML models, such as ANN, RF, and DT, can accurately predict the biochemical properties of mango and strawberry fruits.

Plant phenotyping relevance

果実の成熟関連形質を対象に、分光反射センシング、独自スペクトル指数、機械学習モデルによる非破壊推定法を開発・評価しており、表現型取得・抽出が中心である。

Code and data availability

The article states 'All data are presented within the article' and provides no public repository, dataset, image archive, or author code URL. The ML models were built with generic scikit-learn/Spyder, and no trained models or checkpoints are deposited. No paper-specific public asset is available.

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