Food (Fruit) Quality Recognition by External Appearance and Internal Flavor Factors

The quality of the fruits is important for the consumers and become the requirement rom the suppliers to provide fruits with high standards quality. So, in the past few years, fruit grading systems have established to fulfill the needs of the fruit processing industry inspection. Besides that, the process of fruits involves several steps that can generally be classified into grading, sorting, packaging, transporting and storage. The grading are considered as the most important steps towards the high standard of quality. Fruits are almost graded The fruit grading by visual inspection suffers from the problem of inconsistency in judgment by different persons. There is a need for an automatic fruit classification machine replacing the expensive human labor with a smart fruit quality classification system. This study proposed a practical real-time smart fruits quality grading system classifying by appearance and internal flavor factors in order to decrease human labor cost in fruit industry. The proposed system applies color image processing techniques for the computation of the fruits appearance features and the near-infrared spectroscopy analysis methods for the estimation of internal flavor factors. This study also suggests an artificial neural network model in order to be able to classify fruit grading.