APPEARANCES ARE DECEPTIVE

#PoM – About Quality measurements of fruits. Bruise Detection using NIR Hyperspectral Imaging for Strawberries

Every year tons of food is wasted and lead to economic losses for the food industry. Consumers want fruits that are not spoiled. They care about food safety and request the best quality. Bruises on fruits are often not visible for the consumer. But the fruits are already in the process of rotting. By using hyperspectral imaging it is possible to make the invisible visible with a non-destructive technique for fruit quality analysis.

Choose the best Strawberry for your family 

Imagine going to the supermarket and collecting your fruits for your family. You want the best quality and you don’t want to have an unpleasant surprise when you are back home and the fruits are rotten. Nowadays you trust your supermarket to ensure consistent quality. If you are more experienced in fruit shopping, you can use your senses to choose the right fruits. But you still have the risk that fruits that obviously look ok, are already spoiled.

Make the invisible visible

Hyperspectral imaging is a new technology from the space industry which is capable to provide information about the maturity level, bruises, and containments of fruits. It is ideally suited to help the food industry to achieve a higher quality standard for fruits. In the near future, you will be able to check your fruits in the supermarket on bruises on your own. How does it work? You could have a device similar to a smartphone and scan your fruits to ensure the best quality for your family.

Here is how it works? Let’s see if we can detect bruises in strawberries

For the laboratory settings, we use the near-infrared range of 1000 – 1700 nm to detect possible bruises. To do that we need a hyperspectral camera. We choose the Specim FX17 Camera link. To make sure that hardware works you need the right software. The Perception Park Studio is an intuitive and fast software solution to analyze the data from any hyperspectral camera. 

The Experiment Settings

We show you step by step how we did it. You can apply the set up for your own measurement in the same way.

The Experiment

First step: 

We bought Strawberries in the supermarket. These Strawberries have a nice, fruitful red color. They look delicious. 

Step two:

We link our camera to the computer and start the Perception STUDIO Software.

You can download a free version of our Software here:

Link to download

Step three:

Now we adjust the acquisition parameters and white balancing. After these steps the measurement setup is done. 

After the setup procedure, we are ready to acquire hyperspectral data from our strawberries.

Step four:

In Step four we need to apply Chemical Colour Imaging to extract relevant chemical information out of the strawberry measurement. 

Last step and conclusion

We check if our strawberries are as fresh as they seem to be. We now check the images which are provided from our Perception Park Software.

This experiment was an ideal use case for our Perception Park software. We showed you that we can colour the invisible. Clear results can be seen in the pictures. 

We see that two of the strawberries have bruises. The bruises are not visible with the human eye. You can’t smell them, you can’t see them, except you use our Hypspectral Imaging technology. 

The food industry nowadays could ensure easily a higher food standard in the case of bruises by using hyperspectral imaging. Bruises hold less water. Hyperspectral imaging technology can detect bruises through the absorption and reflection properties of the strawberries.

More information about quality measurements of fruits can be found here:

https://www.agriculturejournals.cz/publicFiles/51700.pdf

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Our perception of the month blog posts showcases the newest developments, market solutions, interesting applications, and fun facts in hyperspectral imaging.

In this monthly format we discover the hyperspectral world with you. 

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