Detection of early bruises on loquat using hyperspectral imaging technology coupled with band ratio and improved Otsu method.

The bruising is one of the major factors affecting the quality of loquat and the bruised areas of loquat are also prone to harbor bacteria and molds. Therefore, it is critical to detect early bruises of loquat. In this study, a method based on hyperspectral imaging technology coupled with band ratio and improved Otsu method was proposed to detect early bruises of loquat. Firstly, the principal component cluster analysis was used to analyze the three regions of Vis-NIR (397.5-1014.0 nm), Vis (397.5-780.0 nm), and NIR (780.0-1014.0 nm), respectively. It was found that the Vis-NIR and NIR spectral regions along PC1 could be used to effectively distinguish bruised tissues. Then, the key wavelength images corresponding to the two regions were selected according to the load curve, respectively, and two sets of PC images and band ratio images of them were established. After comparison, it was found that the band ratio image Q was the most suitable for subsequent analysis of detecting early bruises of loquat. Finally, in order to evaluate the segmentation effect of the improved Otsu method, the segmentation results of the global threshold and the Otsu method were compared with it, respectively, and it was found that the performance of the improved Otsu method was best. However, since the stem-end area and the bruised area have similar intensity features causing mis-segmentation, the stem-end area was removed by curvature-assisted Hough transform circle detection (CACD) algorithm. And all test set samples were used to evaluate the performance of the proposed method, and the overall accuracy of it was 96.0 %. The results show that the detection method proposed in this study has the potential to detect early bruises of loquat in online practical applications, and it provides a theoretical basis for hyperspectral imaging in the bruise detection of fruit.