The 9th International Conference on Agricultural and Biological Sciences (ABS 2023)

Abstract: As one of the most popular fruits in the world, the strawberry (Fragaria × ananassa) is a fruit with a sweet and distinctive flavour, but with a soft texture that spoils quickly. A low-cost method is needed to distinguish perishable strawberries from normal fruit in a non-destructive way, as well as the deterioration of strawberries during storage. In this study, a machine vision system is presented for inspecting the quality of strawberries using ultraviolet (UV) light. Related experiments in postharvest stage validated the effectiveness of the proposed method. The results show that UV fluorescence imaging can be used as a fast, non-destructive and low-cost method to classify perishable and normal strawberries at an early stage, as well as to detect the deterioration of strawberries during storage. These findings suggest that strawberries are prone to rapid postharvest deterioration and can be sorted using UV-fluorescence imaging, which is a realtime, non-destructive, and low-cost sensing method. Meanwhile, the proposed method can be used for non-destructively estimate the deterioration level of a strawberry.

Keywords: Strawberry, fluorescence imaging, non-destructive, postharvest

Biography: Dr.Zichen HUANG, graduated from Kyoto University, Japan, and worked as a researcher at Kyoto University. Now he is a JSPS Postdoctoral Fellowship (Japan Society for the the Promotion of Science) at Kyoto University. His research interests are smart agriculture, including developing agricultural robot positioning systems in greenhouses and fluorescence imaging-based sensing techniques for agricultural products.