Postharvest Biology and Technology 115 (2016) 122–131

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Postharvest Biology and Technology

jo urnal home page: www .elsevier.com/lo cat e/postharvb io

Prediction of mechanical properties of blueberry using hyperspectral interactance

imaging
Meng-Han Hua, Qing-Li Donga,*, Bao-Lin Liua,*, Umezuruike Linus Oparab,c
a
School of Medical Instrument and Food Engineering, University of Shanghai for Science and Technology, 516 Jun Gong Rd., Shanghai 200093, PR China
b
Postharvest Technology Research Laboratory, South African Research Chair in Postharvest Technology, Department of Horticultural Science, Stellenbosch
University, Stellenbosch 7602, South Africa
c
Postharvest Technology Research Laboratory, South African Research Chair in Postharvest Technology, Department of Food Science, Stellenbosch University, Stellenbosch
7602, South Africa

A R T I C L E I N F O A B S T R A C T

Article history: The purpose of this investigation was to develop and validate a hyperspectral interactance imaging system to
Received 14 April 2015 non-destructively estimate blueberry mechanical properties. Four texture profile analysis (TPA) and four puncture
Received in revised form 22 November 2015 analysis (PA) parameters were predicted. A region growing based algorithm was used to segment the acquired
Accepted 23 November 2015
interactance hypercubes and to assist in extracting mean spectra. Subsequently, the spectra were smoothed by
Available online 2 January 2016
Standard Normal Variate (SNV) and Savitzky-Golay first derivative (Der). Least squares support vector machines
integrated with Monte Carlo uninformative variable elimination (MC-UVE) models were developed for mechanical
Keywords: Interactance
parameters. Based on the MC- UVE selected wavelengths, the SNV model performed best for cohesiveness with Rp (Rc)
imaging Fruit quality
value of 0.91 (0.91). The SNV models of springiness, resilience, max force strain and final force resulted in Rp (Rc) values
Texture Monte Carlo
Wavelength selection of 0.84 (0.85), 0.86 (0.87), 0.65 (0.76) and 0.62 (0.72), respectively. Using Der spectra, the Rp (Rc) values were found
to be 0.77 (0.86), 0.71 (0.73) and 0.58 (0.69) for hardness, maximum force and gradient, respectively. Generally,
the overall performances of MC-UVE based models were similar to those with full spectra. The above results showed the
potential of hyperspectral interactance imaging coupled with MC- UVE approach for predicting the mechanical properties
of blueberry and the other small fruit.
ã 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction storage (Chiabrando et al., 2009). Mechanical properties are usually

Blueberry (Vaccinium corymbosum) is considered as a soft fruit with
great economic value owing to its health-promoting properties and
flavor (Gilbert et al., 2014; Flores et al., 2014). Blueberry mechanical
properties have been found to be a significant factor associated with
fruit quality and freshness, which in turn affect consumer preference
and acceptability (Giongo et al., 2013; Saftner et al., 2008). Giongo et
al. (2013) reported the application of puncture analysis (PA) to characterize
the mechanical properties of commercial blueberry cultivars during
fruit development, ripening and storage. Other studies have shown that
mechanical properties influenced variety selection in breeding programs
and transportability as well as postharvest life (Blaker et al., 2014; Li et al.,
2011). For example, the texture profile analysis (TPA) parameters were
successfully related to changes of blueberry quality attributes during
postharvest
* Corresponding authors. Fax: +86 21 5527 1117.
E-mail addresses: qdong@usst.edu.cn (Q.-L. Dong), blliuk@163.com (B.-L. Liu).
detected using invasive and contact methods, such as puncture, penetrate
and compression (Paniagua et al., 2014; Chen and Opara, 2013a,b;
Retamales and Hancock, 2012; Chiabrando et al., 2009). However, such
traditional approaches are laborious, time-consuming and a sampling
examination. Considering the importance of mechanical properties as
quality cues during consumption of blueberry and the desire for non-
destructive measurements, it is necessary to develop accurate, rapid, efficient
and non-contact techniques for determining their mechanical parameters.
Hyperspectral imaging technique has been efficiently used to evaluate
food quality. Compared with other non-destructive techniques,
hyperspectral imaging requires minimal sample preparation and acquires
both spatial and spectral information (Lorente et al., 2012). In contrast
to traditional spectroscopy, hyperspectral imaging can capture more
representative spectra and is thus more suitable for application in online
detection and measurement. Furthermore, hyperspectral techniques can
facili- tate deeper understanding of the structure and quality of non-
homogeneous products (Wang et al., 2013; Schaare and Fraser,

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.postharvbio.2015.11.021
0925-5214/ã 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
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analysis rather than quantitative analysis (Coelho et al., 2013; Huang et

Nomenclature
al., 2012). A hyperspectral imaging system combining reflectance and
transmittance modes was reported by Ariana and Lu (2008a,b), and this
TPA Texture profile analysis integrated architecture led to satisfactory performance for quality evaluation
PA Puncture analysis of pickling cucumbers (Lu and Ariana, 2013; Ariana and Lu, 2010). Another
SNV Standard Normal Variate group of investigators inspected embedded bone fragments in chicken
Der Savitzky-Golay of the first derivative fillets simulta- neously using hyperspectral transmittance and reflectance
MC-UVE Monte Carlo-uninformative variable elimi- modes (Seung et al., 2008). In terms of blueberry, a comparison of
nation reflectance and transmittance and their integrated modes was reported by
LV Latent variable Leiva-Valenzuela et al. (2014), and the authors concluded that
LS-SVM Partial-least support vector machine reflectance was superior to transmittance mode in predicting firmness
Rc, Rp Pearson correlation coefficients of calibra- tion and soluble solids content, and the combined mode did not result in
and prediction improved predictions. Further- more, our previous study assessed the
RMSEC, RMSEp Root mean square error of calibration and blueberry comprehensive mechanical properties using similar imaging
prediction setup, and results showed that such system was acceptable for estimating
Sr Relative sample image most mechanical parameters (Hu et al., 2015).
SR Sample image The interactance sensing is considered a compromise between reflectance
SD Dark image of operated exposure time and transmittance modes for near-infrared (NIR) spectroscopy (Magwaza
Rw Reference white image of corrected expo- sure et al., 2012). The difference among three sensing modes is the position of
time the light source and optical detector (Wu and Sun, 2013b). For interactance,
RD Reference dark image of corrected exposure time the illumination and imaging unit are located on the same side of the sample
and parallel to each other in such a way that specular reflection does not reach
Sj Stability of jth wavelength
bj PLS regression coefficients of jth wave- the detector (Fig. 1, left). In the case of interactance imaging, some
length literature had been published on the quality assessment of meat products
k An arbitrary value in Eq. (3) (Gou et al., 2013; O’Farrell et al., 2010; ElMasry and Wold, 2008). In
comparative studies using reflectance, transmittance and interactance
modes, interactance has been reported to have more advantages than the
others such as carrying deeper information about sample structure and
composition (Wang et al., 2013; Schaare and Fraser, 2000) due in part to
2000). Based on imaging architecture, this optical technique can be less effects of product surface and thickness on performance (Wu and Sun,
categorized into reflectance, transmittance, interactance and scattering 2013b). However, there are limited publications using interactance
sensing modes. Among these modes, the scattering imaging was found imaging for food quality estimation because of its relatively complicated
not feasible for small fruit such as blueberry in our preliminary experiments. structure. Results reported by Leiva-Valenzuela et al. (2014)
The reflectance mode is widely used in food quality detection as it is easy to suggested that the hyperspectral interactance measurement might be
construct and perform (Wu and Sun, 2013a), and Leiva-Valenzuela et al. unsuitable for small fruits, especially for blueberry. In our preliminary
(2013) applied this mode to estimate the blueberry firmness and experiments, images with good quality were successfully acquired by
soluble solids content with correlation coefficients of prediction of 0.87 and adjusting the imaging conditions, and this highlighted the scope for
0.79, respectively. In contrast, the transmittance mode is considered to be further study investigating the application of hyperspectral interactance
better than the reflectance mode for internal quality evaluation because it imaging for evaluating blueberry quality.
allows the acquisition of information inside the food materials via
analyzing the transmitted light (Magwaza et al.,
2012). However, this mode is frequently used for qualitative

Fig. 1. Photographs of hyperspectral reflectance/transmittance/interactance/scattering imaging system. (For interpretation of the references to color in this figure legend, the reader is referred to the
web version of this article.)
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(2014) on pear soluble solids content estimation using visible and NIR
spectra. Nevertheless, the potential use of this method needs to be explored in
hyperspectral data analysis.
This study aims to investigate the feasibility of hyperspectral
interactance imaging for predicting mechanical properties of blueberry
measured by texture profile analysis (TPA) and puncture analysis (PA). The
specific steps of the current study are as follows: (1) acquire hyperspectral
interactance images of blueberry with good quality, (2) eliminate
uninformative variables using MC-UVE algorithm, and (3) develop least
squares support vector machines (LS-SVM) models of blueberry
mechanical properties using the whole and selected wavelengths.

2. Materials and methods

2.1. Blueberry samples

A total of 429 and 383 blueberries (V. corymbosum) with size of

Fig. 2. Distribution of incident light in hyperspectral interactance mode.
Hyperspectal images comprise a large number of datasets with redundant
information, and, therefore, it is necessary to choose spectra that are
particularly informative with respect to the relevant quality attributes
of the product under study. Several investigators had reviewed research
on wavelength selection methods in hyperspectral image analysis (Dai
et al., 2014b; Liu et al., 2014; Firtha, 2007). These include interval
partial least squares (PLS) (Leiva-Valenzuela et al., 2014),
uninformative variable elimination (UVE) (Wang et al., 2012),
competitive adaptive reweighted sampling (He et al., 2014) and
artificial neural networks (ElMasry et al., 2009). Among these approaches,
UVE can eliminate useless variables through assessing their stability
(Centner et al., 1996) and has been shown to perform well in several
hyperspectral imaging applications, such as estimating the chemical
composition of mutton (Pu et al., 2014) and detecting gelatin adulteration
in prawn (Wu et al., 2013). To overcome the problem of low efficiency
encountered with standard UVE, Cai et al. (2008) proposed a procedure
based on Monte Carlo random sampling, called MC-UVE, which was
verified to outperform traditional PLS methods as well as standard UVE on
NIR data. The feasibility of MC-UVE was further validated by Li et al.
11–13 mm in height were used for texture profile analysis (TPA) and
puncture analysis (PA), respectively. The first batch of blueberries
was imported from Frutera San Fernando S.A., Chile and the latter batch
from TAL S.A., Peru in October, 2014. Berries were stored at 4 C and the
experiments were carried out within
6 days after transportation to the lab. To guarantee the model robustness,
both blueberries with little visible physical damage and sound surface were
analyzed.
2.2. Hyperspectral interactance image acquisition
A pushbroom Vis–NIR hyperspectral interactance imaging system
(Fig. 1, left) was constructed based on a hyperspectral reflectance and
transmittance imaging system (Fig. 1, right) by Isuzu Optics Corp.,
Taiwan according to our design. This system mainly comprised of an
imaging spectrograph (Imspector V10E, Spectral Imaging Ltd., Finland)
attached to a 16-bit electron- magnifying charge-coupled detector
(EMCCD) camera of
1004 1002 (spatial spectral) active pixels (Falcon EM285CL, Raptor
Photonics Led., U.K.) and a C-mount lens (Xenoplan 1.4/17, Jos. Schneider
Optische Werke GmbH, Germany), a halogen light source and control unit
(3900-ER, 21 V/150 W, Illumination Technologies, Inc., USA)
connected to line lights (9130-HT, Illumination Technologies, Inc.,
USA) assembling collector lenses (9560, Illumination Technologies, Inc.,
USA) by optic fibers (9145- HT, Illumination Technologies, Inc., USA),
and a mobile sample stage controlled by a linear travel translation stage
controller (IRCP0076-1COMB, Isuzu Optics Corp., Taiwan).

Table 1
Pearson correlation matrices for TPA and PA parameters of blueberry.

Hardness Springiness Resilience Gumminess Cohesiveness Chewiness Hardness2

Hardness 1.0000
Springiness 0.3523 1.0000
Resilience 0.5286 0.3589 1.0000
Gumminess 0.7613 -0.0451 0.1165 1.0000
Cohesiveness 0.5738 0.3413 0.2538 0.9219 1.0000
Chewiness 0.4080 0.2837 0.9659 0.2230 0.3264 1.0000
Hardness2 0.9887 0.2961 0.4339 0.8251 0.6556 0.3263 1.0000

Force Max Max Force Strain Force Area Force Linear Distance Gradient Final Force

Maximum Force 1.0000

Max Force Strain 0.5557 1.0000
Force Area 0.9005 0.5369 1.0000
Force Linear Distance 0.9048 0.4782 0.8413 1.0000
Gradient 0.3212 0.1572 0.3184 0.3243 1.0000
Final Force 0.3995 0.3653 0.5983 0.6232 0.0018 1.0000

Note that the parameters in bold are selected for further analysis.
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In order to achieve interactance imaging, a new unit was suspended
over a mobile sample stage, allowing the field of hypercube collection
was parallel to the illuminated field. This unit mainly consisted of a line
light with a collector lens, a focusing mirror and an adjustable light shield.
The light shield, made of two black metal plates with adjustable height, could
reduce unwanted reflected light from both the sample surface and light
source (O’Farrell et al., 2010). Fig. 2 shows the distribution of incident light
in interactance mode.
For the interactance mode, the motor speed was set at 1.5 mm/ s and the
exposure time was 100 ms. The actual light intensities at the surface of sample
stage were 20 kLux. After the interactance with sample, it was difficult to
detect the interacted light using the EMCCD camera, and the gain of
EMCCD was, therefore, adjusted to obtain values close to 80% of the
maximum pixel output of the EMCCD camera. The hyperspectral
images of blueberries were captured with the stem scar facing vertically
toward the lens. A total of 406 wavelengths between 675.33 nm and 1000.76
nm with a spectral resolution of 0.80 nm were selected for further
analysis.
2.3. Mechanical parameters measurement
A texture analyzer (TA.XTPlus, Stable Micro Systems, Inc.,
Surrey, U.K.) was used to obtain the mechanical parameters. The texture
analyzer was equipped with a 490 N load cell and a blueberry was placed
between a compression/puncture cylindrical probe and a cylindrical
stainless flat platform with its stem scar facing vertically toward the probe.
An auto force trigger of 5 g and a digital data acquisition resolution of 500
points per second were applied for both tests. The force and height
measurements of the texture analyzer were calibrated prior to the tests. The
calculation of mechanical parameters has been described in our previous
study (Hu et al., 2015; Fig. S2 for review)
Fig. 3. Main steps of hyperspectral interactance cube processing. (For interpretation of the references to color in this figure legend, the reader is referred to the web version of this article.)
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See Supp Figure S1 as supplementary file. Supplementary material
related to this article found, in the online version, at
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.postharvbio.2015.11.021.
For TPA tests, the samples were compressed twice to 30%
deformation by a cylindrical plate of 50 mm diameter at the test speed of 0.8
mm/s with a pre- and post-test speed of 1.6 mm/s and
2 mm/s, respectively. After the first compression, the probe returned
to the trigger position and held at this position for
10 s. Seven TPA mechanical parameters viz. hardness, hardness2,
resilience, cohesiveness, gumminess, chewiness and springiness were
derived from the generated curve. Owing to the mechanical characters of
blueberry and the setting of deformation degree, fracturability,
adhesiveness and stringiness in the typical TPA curve presented by Bourne
(2002) were not calculated.
In the PA tests, samples were punctured to 80% of their initial height
using a probe of 5 mm diameter at the test speed of
1.7 mm/s with a pre- and post-test speed of 2 mm/s and 5 mm/s, respectively.
Six mechanical parameters were obtained by the PA test. From the force–
strain profile, the maximal force (FM), maximal force strain (MFS),
force linear distance (FLD), final force (FF) and force area (FA) were
calculated, and the gradient (so- called elastic modulus) was determined
from the plot of stress versus strain. FM had a similar physical meaning
as firmness in previous studies (Rajkumar et al., 2012; Leiva-Valenzuela
et al.,
2014, 2013) according to definitions and test settings. If the Pearson
correlation coefficient (R) between two mechanical parameters was
beyond 0.8 (Table 1), only one parameter was subjectively chosen for
further analysis, e.g., cohesiveness was highly correlated with gumminess
(R = 0.9219) and the former was selected to be predicted by hyperspectral
imaging. To some extent, the selected parameters viz. hardness, springiness,
cohesiveness, resilience, FM, MFS, gradient and FF might be regarded
as containing most mechanical information of the discarded
parameters.
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Fig. 4. Flowchart of the entire data processes for predicting blueberry comprehensive mechanical properties.

2.4. Image and spectral processing Eq. (1) was applied for correcting the original images line by line.

SR SD
4
The line reference images for interactance modes were Sr ¼ 10 ð1Þ
RW RD
obtained using a rectangular white standard (Spectral Imaging

Ltd., Finland). The purpose of the line correction method is to avoid the where Sr is the relative sample image, SR is the sample image, SD is the dark
instability of light source in spatial dimension. The following image of operated exposure time, RW is the reference white image of
corrected exposure time, and RD is the reference
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Table 2
Statistics of mechanical properties of blueberries.

Mechanical properties Mean Standard deviation Min Max Variability (%)a

Hardness (N) 0.059 0.011 0.026 0.112 18.1

Springiness ( ) 0.676 0.035 0.456 0.778 5.2
Cohesiveness ( ) 0.330 0.041 0.239 0.505 12.4
Resilience ( ) 0.133 0.020 0.089 0.226 15.0
MaximumForce (N) 0.078 0.018 0.024 0.154 23.7
Max Force Strain (%) 37.321 7.464 21.053 79.998 20.0
Gradient (g/mm2/%) 1.0175 0.338 0.099 2.112 33.2
Final Force (N) 0.059 0.012 0.055 0.073 19.9

a
Variability = the ratio between standard deviation and mean of the parameters.

dark image of corrected exposure time. Ten reference white and dark
images were acquired each time, and then averaged for correction.
A segmentation algorithm based region growing (Adams and Bischof,
1994) was utilized to acquire the mask images from the relative interactance
images, and the steps for this process are summarized in Fig. 3. Since the
shield cannot block the reflected light completely, the pixels below the
centeroid of blueberry were discarded to obtain predominant interacted
signals. Subsequently, the mask operation was used to form images without
background for extracting the spectral data. In current study, Standard Normal
Variate (SNV) and the Savitzky-Golay of the first derivative using a
9-point window and a second-order polynomial (Der) were applied
for smoothing the spectra (Rinnan et al., 2009).
2.5. Wavelength elimination and prediction model
An improved Kennard-Stone sampling method (Galvão et al.,
2005) was applied for separating samples into calibration and prediction
sets. For each mechanical parameter, the calibration set included 75% of
samples and the remaining samples formed the prediction set.
Partial least squares (PLS) regression is an approach to construct
the relationship between two data matrices, and has become a
vector machines (SVM) which are a set of kernel based supervised learning
methods for classification and regression analysis (Suykens et al., 2002; van
Gestel et al., 2004). LS-SVM has proved to be feasible in many applications
in the area of food quality detection (Wu et al.,
2013). In this study, a radial basis function was chosen as the kernel function,
and two tuning parameters, i.e., regularization and kernel functionparameters,
were initially set to 10 and 0.2, respectively. The optimal values of two tuning
parameters were first searched by a coupled simulated annealing, and
afterwards fine-tuned by a simplex method (De Brabanter et al., 2011).
In the current work, PLS and SVM regressions were respectively applied
for wavelength selection and modeling.
Monte Carlo-uninformative variable elimination (MC-UVE) method
is based on PLS using a Monte Carlo algorithm as stochastic
technique for stability analysis of regression coefficients (Cai et al., 2008). In
this study, the sub-calibration sets including
75% of calibration samples were randomly selected via the MC
technique, and numerous PLS models were established using these sample
sets. Using the PLS regression coefficients, the following equation defined
by Centner et al. (1996) was utilized to calculate the stability of each
wavelength.
mean bj
Sj ¼ ð2Þ
std b j

standard tool in chemometrics with manyapplications in food (Wold et al., In Eq. (2), mean (bj) and std (bj) refer to the mean and standard deviation
2001; Leiva-Valenzuela et al., 2013). Least squares support vector values of PLS regression coefficients for the jth wavelength,
machines (LS-SVM) are least squares versions of support respectively.

Fig. 5. Typical interactance spectra of 10 blueberries in the 390.65–1113.54 nm wavelength range. (For interpretation of the references to color in this figure legend, the reader is referred to the web
version of this article.)
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In order to determine a suitable cutoff threshold, the following formula is
defined according to the equation for conventional UVE (Cai et al., 2008):
cutoff ¼ k max abs Sj
where max (abs (Sj)) denotes to obtain the maximum value of the absolute
stability, and k is an arbitrary value from 0.10 to 0.75 with interval of 0.05.
According to the definition of UVE, the larger the absolute value of
stability, the more important is the corresponding wavelength. Hence, the
wavelengths with absolute stability above the cutoff thresholds will be
retained and the remaining will be eliminated. Moreover, Monte Carlo
cross-validation (MCCV) developed by Picard and Cook (1984) is
used in MC-UVE to estimate the parameters of models replacing K-
fold and leave-one-out method to decrease the risk of model overfitting
(Xu et al., 2004). The procedure of wavelength elimination and modelling
is described as follows:
(1) Determine the latent variable (LV) number: 200 PLS models based
on original spectra were constructed for each mechani- cal parameter
using corresponding 200 sub-calibration sets, and this procedure was
repeated 5 times. The appropriate LV number was confirmed by root
mean square errors for cross- validation (RMSECV).
(2) Calculate cutoff threshold: 200 PLS models were established using
the optimal LV number for every k in Eq. (3). The suitable cutoff
threshold was determined by the minimum RMSECV value. This
process was carried out for both SNV and Der spectra.
(3) Establish prediction model: the informative wavelengths could be
determined by MC-UVE with the optimal cutoff, and used for subsequent
modelling with the application of partial-least support vector machine
(LS-SVM). This run was repeated
5 times. In addition, the prediction models based on whole
406 wavelengths were also established. The performances of the
resulting models were examined in terms of the Pearson correlation
coefficients of calibration (Rc) and prediction (Rp), root mean square
error of calibration (RMSEc) and prediction (RMSEp).
All the aforementioned operations inclusive of image and spectral
processing as well as chemometric analysis were executed in Matlab R2009b
software (The Math Work, Inc., Natick, MA, USA). A LS-SVMlab Toolbox
ð3Þ version 1.8 (Suykens, Leuven, Belgium) was used for LS-SVM modelling.
Fig. 4 summarizes the entire data analysis in this study.
3. Results and discussion
3.1. Mechanical properties and spectral features of blueberry
A large variability in quality parameters will make the model robust, and
the statistical data on eight blueberry quality parameters is presented
in Table 2. Apart from springiness, the other parameters had a variability
beyond 12.4% (Table 2). The variability of PA parameters was large
compared to the TPA parameters.
As can be seen from Fig. 5, considerably lower and more consistent
interactance occurred in the visible region from
390.65 nm to 675.33 nm. The low interactance might be attributed
to the strong absorption of deep dark pigments in the blueberry skin.
This explanation is in agreement with the study of Leiva-Valenzuela et
al. (2013) who investigated the firmness and soluble solids content of
blueberries using hyper- spectral reflectance imaging. Beyond 675.33 nm,
the interactance increased dramatically to a peak around 860.52 nm,
and a subsequent decline was observed from the first peak to a valley around
975.02 nm. The possible reason causing this spectral valley was the
combined absorption of OH groups from carbohydrates and water.
In the rest of spectral region, a small peak occurred. However, numerous
noises existed between the spectral range from 1000.76 nm and 1113.54 nm,
due in part to the low quantum efficiency of the EMCCD in this range. The
pattern of blueberry interactance spectra was different with the reflectance and
transmittance in the previous study of Leiva-Valenzuela et al. (2014). For
the purpose of acquiring useful wavelengths for modelling, the spectral
region from 675.33 nm to 1000.76 nm was selected for the following analysis.

Table 3
Prediction models for mechanical parameters of blueberries using 406 wavelengths from 675.33 nm to 1000.76 nm.

Mechanical parameter Pre-processing Rp RMSEp Rc RMSEc

Hardness (N) SNV 0.6924 0.0568 0.9487 0.0470

Der 0.8072 0.0583 0.8461 0.0717

Springiness ( ) SNV 0.8461 0.0207 0.8425 0.0348

Der 0.7708 0.0257 0.8539 0.0335

Cohesiveness ( ) SNV 0.9128 0.0325 0.9124 0.0482

Der 0.8631 0.0459 0.9425 0.0399

Resilience ( ) SNV 0.8620 0.0429 0.8893 0.0575

Der 0.8108 0.0517 0.9550 0.0404

Maximum Force (N) SNV 0.7384 0.0711 0.7544 0.1078

Der 0.7837 0.0774 0.6012 0.1222

Max Force Strain (%) SNV 0.6639 0.0660 0.7690 0.0807

Der 0.5975 0.0604 0.8067 0.0791

Gradient (g/mm2/%) SNV 0.5757 0.1145 0.7259 0.1478

Der 0.6271 0.1145 0.6404 0.1589

Final force (N) SNV 0.6243 0.0743 0.7212 0.1003

Der 0.6404 0.0764 0.7492 0.0984

Note: RMSE values were calculated from the normalized values of mechanical parameters; the units of RMSE are presented in the first column.
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Fig. 6. Plots of RMSECV for mechanical parameters of (a) TPA and (b) PA (red symbols indicate the minimization of RMSECV). (For interpretation of the references to color in this figure legend,
the reader is referred to the web version of this article.)
3.2. Prediction models using whole spectra
Table 3 summarizes calibration and prediction results for blueberry
mechanical parameters based on whole spectra. Models with SNV spectra
were promising for springiness, cohesiveness and resilience, with the Rp
(Rc) values of 0.85 (0.84), 0.91 (0.91) and
0.86 (0.89), respectively. The performance of Der spectra was
better than that of SNV spectra for hardness prediction, with nearly
0.12 increments in Rp. On the aspect of PA parameters, the FM
prediction model of Der spectra produced the Rp (Rc) value of 0.78 (0.60).
However, both SNV and Der spectra did not yield desired results for
predicting MFS and gradient as well as FF, with the Rp values below 0.66.
The higher RMSE had been observed for gradient than the other
parameters, indicating the hyperspectral interactance mode might be
unsuitable for predicting gradient. Furthermore, examination of RMSE
values in Table 3 demonstrated that TPA parameters had the lower
RMSE than those of PA parameters. The above results show the
possibility to use
hyperspectral interactance spectra from 675.33 nm to
1000.76 nm for estimating TPA parameters and FF of blueberry.
3.3. Determination of LV number and cutoff
The optimal LV number for each parameter was determined by the
minimum RMSECV. In Fig. 6 the mean values of RMSECV are shown,
which were calculated from 1000 PLS models. From Fig. 6, it was clear that
the LV numbers of all mechanical parameters reached the smallest
RMSECV in the range from 6 to 9. The LV number of 9 could be used
for hardness and FM; 7 for springiness and resilience, and 6 for gradient and
FF. In terms of cohesiveness, the optimal LV number was 8.
Particularly, two optimal LV numbers were observed for MFS (i.e. 7 and
9). In order to make the following selection scheme simple, 7 was chosen as
LV number for MFS.
There are several cutoff criterions in traditional UVE (Moros et al.,
2008; Ye et al., 2008). However, the cutoff criterion for MC- UVE is still
limited. In the current study, we used the method

Table 4
Prediction models for mechanical parameters of blueberries using MC-UVE-LS-SVM with 5 repeated runs.

Mechanical parameter Pre-processing k Wavelength number (5 results) Rp (s) RMSEp Rc (s) RMSEc

Hardness (N) SNV 0.65 27; 29; 33; 37; 39 0.6849 (0.0121) 0.0578 0.9148 0.0578
Der 0.35 83; 92; 79; 87; 89 0.7653 0.0638 0.8640 0.0676

Springiness ( ) SNV 0.45 119; 119; 126; 110; 120 0.8437 0.0212 0.8517 0.0340
Der 0.25 138; 127; 131; 128; 125 0.7453 0.0268 0.8823 0.0307

Cohesiveness ( ) SNV 0.50 28; 45; 39; 31; 33 0.9072 0.0334 0.8955 0.0518
Der 0.30 105; 101; 103; 110; 105 0.8399 0.0485 0.9238 0.0446

Resilience ( ) SNV 0.45 64; 59; 57; 50; 73 0.8593 0.0431 0.8869 0.0580
Der 0.35 132; 143; 131; 139; 136 0.8051 0.0541 0.9453 0.0434

Maximum force (N) SNV 0.65 15; 23; 17; 25; 16 0.6739 (0.0248) 0.0754 0.6855 (0.0317) 0.1146
Der 0.65 42; 46; 30; 46; 36 0.7106 (0.0263) 0.0751 0.7297 (0.0398) 0.1095

Max force Strain (N) SNV 0.45 31; 36; 35; 45; 37 0.6537 0.0664 0.7613 (0.0199) 0.0813
Der 0.65 13; 12; 11; 14; 14 0.5493 (0.0100) 0.0638 0.7628 (0.0178) 0.0825

Gradient (g/mm2/%) SNV 0.70 57; 63; 48; 39; 53 0.5779 0.1143 0.6751 0.1534
Der 0.60 25; 36; 29; 30; 33 0.5821 (0.0168) 0.1181 0.6886 0.1511

Final force (N) SNV 0.35 145; 143; 145; 140; 129 0.6238 0.0747 0.7219 (0.0138) 0.1002
Der 0.50 52; 55; 55; 50; 51 0.6148 (0.0101) 0.0776 0.6148 0.0934

Note: s is the standard deviation of 5 repeated runs; the absence of s means the value is lower than 0.0100; RMSE values were calculated from the normalized values of mechanical parameters; the
units of RMSE are presented in the first column.
130 M.-H.
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and and
Fig. 7. Stability distribution of SNV pre-processed spectra for hardness in calibration set (number of latent variables = 9, and MC procedure is repeated 200 times).
described in step (2) in Section 2.5 to confirm the cutoff. The optimal
k value in Eq. (3) for each predicted parameter is shown in Table 4. The
stability distribution of hardness is shown in Fig. 7. The two horizontal dot
lines refer to the lower and upper cutoff thresholds. Based on the
principle of MC-UVE, the wavelengths within the dot lines should be
discarded. Therefore, in this MC-UVE run, total 33 wavelengths were
selected for further hardness modelling. Using the same operation, the
informative wavelengths could be determined for the other mechanical
parameters.
3.4. Prediction models based on MC-UVE selected wavelengths
Table 4 shows the calibration and prediction models of blueberry
mechanical parameters based on MC-UVE selected wavelengths. In
the case of hardness, the Der model performed better than SNV, whereas
the former required nearly 50 more spectra than SNV based model
for every run. This was also observed for FM in both calibration and
prediction results. Previous study of Dai et al. (2014a) reported Rp = 0.85 for
hardness in prawn using reflectance imaging, which was better than that in
blueberry using interacance spectra in this investigation. The SNV pre-
processing method resulted in superior models for predicting springiness,
cohesiveness, resilience and MFS than Der, with Rp (Rc) values of 0.84
(0.85), 0.91 (0.91), 0.86 (0.89) and 0.65 (0.76), respectively. Moreover,
in addition to MFS, the SNV models of springiness and cohesiveness as
well as resilience required fewer wavelengths than those based on Der
spectra. This was consider- ably obvious for cohesiveness prediction,
indicating that the SNV spectra were useful for selecting wavelengths
particularly infor- mative with respect to cohesiveness. These two spectral
pre- treatment approaches yielded similar performances for estimating
gradient and FF. The small standard deviation of 5 repeated runs revealed
satisfactory repeatability of LS-SVM model based on the MC-UVE method
(Table 4). Furthermore, comparison of statistical indicators in Tables 3 and
4 demonstrated the possibility to use MC-UVE selected interactance
spectra for predicting blueberry mechanical properties.
The prediction models reported in this study based on interactance
data shows the feasibility of non-invasive sorting and grading of
agricultural and horticultural products. For fresh
Technology
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122–131 130
produce industry, an online multispectral interactance system could be
developed for classifying blueberry. The interactance model can be used
for the continuous and non-destructive acquisition of data on mechanical
properties on the same intact berries in relation to quality during postharvest
operations.
4. Conclusion
In this study, hyperspectral interactance imaging was used to estimate the
mechanical properties of intact blueberry. Based on MC-UVE selected
wavelengths, a relatively high correlation was obtained between
cohesiveness and SNV interactance spectra with Rp (Rc) of 0.91 (0.91). For
the other fruit quality parameters, good prediction results based on SNV
spectra were achieved for springiness, resilience, MFS and FF with Rp
(Rc) of 0.84 (0.85),
0.86 (0.87), 0.65 (0.76) and 0.62 (0.72), respectively. Using Der
spectra, hardness, FM and gradient could be predicted with Rp (Rc) of 0.77
(0.86), 0.71 (0.73) and 0.58 (0.69), respectively. Overall, the results were
considered to be acceptable compared to the corresponding models
obtained using entire wavelengths. These findings show that hyperspectral
interactance spectra coupled with the MC-UVE method has potential for
predicting mechanical properties of blueberry.
Acknowledgements
This study was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation
of China (NSFC31271896), the Innovation Fund Project for Graduate
Student of Shanghai (JWCXSL1401) and the Joint Science and
Technology Research of Triangle Area of Science and Technology
Commission of Shanghai Municipality (15395810900). U.L. Opara’s
contribution was supported by the South African Research Chairs
Initiative of the Department of Science and Technology.
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