Spectral discrimination of kiwifruit with chilling injury from fruit with other types of tissue damage in high-speed grading applications

Chilling injury is a physiological disorder that can develop in kiwifruit during prolonged cool storage.
At an early stage, symptoms are not visually apparent without cutting the fruit open.
Development of non-destructive methods for early stage chilling injury detection has been a recent research focus.
Using standard visible – near-infrared interactance spectroscopy – spectral characteristics of chill-damaged kiwifruit were investigated, particularly the spectral discrimination of chill-damaged fruit from fruit with visually similar tissue damage caused by impacts and rots.
The initial expectation had been that the main visual damage symptom, in all cases internal water-soaked tissue, would dominate observed spectral characteristics.
This proved not to be the case, the presence of tissues with a granular and/or corky appearance within chill-damaged fruit being a dominant feature.
Compared with sound fruit, the spectral pattern changes of all damaged fruit looked different.
While the spectral pattern differences of rotten and chill-damaged fruit appeared similar, those from impact-damaged fruit differed.

X International Symposium on Kiwifruit

Z. Wang, R. Künnemeyer, A. McGlone, J. Burdon, J. Sun, K. Sharrock, M.J. Cree

Actinidia, quality, impact damage, rots, NIR

https://doi.org/10.17660/ActaHortic.2022.1332.37