A LOW COST NIR BASED EMBEDDED SYSTEM FOR FRUIT QUALITY ASSESSMENT

India is one of the largest producers of fruits in the world.Banana, pineapple and mango are the major fruits produced in our country. In fruits, internal defects, presence of worms, etc. needs to be detected. Recently Computer Vision System (CVS) and image processing are used for evaluating external visual quality factors such as colour, shape, etc. Various non-destructive technologies such as VIS/NIR spectroscopy, ultrasonic, X-ray and MRI are used for evaluating internal quality factors such as sugar content, acid content, etc. But in India, there is lack of such improved technologies and instrumentation for getting right information about quality since these techniques are highly expensive. Thus sorting of fruits is done manually. In manual sorting, it is hardly possible to detect the internal defects.This has resulted in rejection of fruits for export from India. Thus there is a need to develop an embedded system to detect the internal defects including the presence of worms in fruits. In this work NIR based imaging is used for low cost detection of presence of worms in fruits.