Using short-wave infrared imaging for fruit quality evaluation

Quality evaluation of agricultural and food products is important for processing, inventory control, and marketing. Fruit size and surface quality are two important quality factors for high-quality fruit such as Medjool dates. Fruit size is usually measured by length that can be done easily by simple image processing techniques. Surface quality evaluation on the other hand requires more complicated design, both in image acquisition and image processing. Skin delamination is considered a major factor that affects fruit quality and its value. This paper presents an efficient histogram analysis and image processing technique that is designed specifically for real-time surface quality evaluation of Medjool dates. This approach, based on short-wave infrared imaging, provides excellent image contrast between the fruit surface and delaminated skin, which allows significant simplification of image processing algorithm and reduction of computational power requirements. The proposed quality grading method requires very simple training procedure to obtain a gray scale image histogram for each quality level. Using histogram comparison, each date is assigned to one of the four quality levels and an optimal threshold is calculated for segmenting skin delamination areas from the fruit surface. The percentage of the fruit surface that has skin delamination can then be calculated for quality evaluation. This method has been implemented and used for commercial production and proven to be efficient and accurate.