One spoiled fruit or vegetable reaching export markets can result in the entire shipment being returned or destroyed.
Being able to detect changes in the flesh composition of fruits and vegetables can help food producers remove potentially damaged produce prior to packing and transportation, reducing costs in lost shipments.
Through the ‘Delivering Perfect Fruit’ research programme, funded through the MBIE Endeavour Fund, engineers at Plant and Food Research have developed a new sensing technology that can detect internal damage to fruits and vegetables that may lead to premature spoilage.
The new technology uses laser beams to scan produce as it moves through the packhouse grading system, grading the produce as defective or non-defective.
So far, the system has been shown to detect internal damage to apples, kiwifruit and onions with higher accuracy than existing scanning technologies.
The system is based on a new type of near-infrared technology, termed Dual-Laser, that uses a pair of dua laser light sources, modulated to different frequencies, and a pair of simple photo-diode detectors.
Using a fast rotating multi-sided, multi-angled mirror, the laser beams scan across the top half of the produce visible to the lasers.
The collected laser beam signals result in high resolution data from 1,000 scanning locations being fed into a computer algorithm which has been ‘taught’ through machine learning to identify damage within the produce.
These can then be redirected based on the extent of the damage.
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