Size estimation of tomato fruits based on spectroscopic analysis

This study used visible and near-infrared (VIS-NIR) spectroscopy for size estimation of tomato fruits of three cultivars. A mobile, fibre-type, VIS-NIR spectrophotometer (AgroSpec, Tec 5, Germany) with spectral range of 350-2200 nm, was used to measure reflectance spectra of on-vine tomatoes growing from July to September 2010. Spectra were divided into a calibration set (75%) and an independent validation set (25%). A partial least squares regression (PLSR) with leave-one-out cross validation was adopted to establish calibration models between fruit diameter and spectra. Furthermore, the latent variables (LVs) obtained from PLS regression was used as input to back-propagation artificial neural network (BPANN) analysis. Result shows that the prediction of PLSR model can produce good performance with coefficient of determination (R2) of 0.82, root-mean-square error of prediction (RMSEP) of 4.87 mm and residual prediction deviation (RPD) of 2.35. Compared to the PLSR model, the PLS-BPANN model provides considerably higher prediction performance with R2 of 0.88, RMSEP of 3.98 mm and RPD of 2.89. It is concluded that VIS-NIR spectroscopy coupled with PLS-BPANN can be adopted successfully for size estimation of tomato fruits.