Detection of cold injury in peaches by hyperspectral reflectance imaging and artificial neural network.

Peaches in cold storage may develop chill damage, as symptomized by deteriorated texture and lack of juice. To examine fruit quality, we established a hyperspectral imaging system to detect cold injury, and an artificial neural network (ANN) model was developed for which eight optimal wavelengths were selected. Between normal and chill-damaged peaches, significant differences in fruit quality parameters and the spectral response to correlating selected wavelengths were observed. Evidencing this relationship, the correlation coefficients between quality parameters and the respective spectral response of eight selected wavelengths were -0.587 to -0.700, 0.393 to 0.552, 0.510 to 0.751, and 0.574 to 0.773. With optimal representative wavelengths as inputs for the ANN model, the overall classification accuracy of chill damage was 95.8% for all cold-stored samples. The ANN prediction models for quality parameters performed well, with correlation coefficients from 0.6979 to 0.9026. This research demonstrates feasibility of hyperspectral reflectance imaging technique for detecting cold injury.