Fast estimation of optical properties of pear using a single snapshot technique combined with a least-squares support vector regression model based on spatial frequency domain imaging

Spatial frequency domain imaging has great potential in agricultural produce quality control due to its advantage of wide-field mapping of absorption (μa) and reduced scattering (μs′) parameters. However, it is not widely adopted in real applications due to the large time cost during image acquisition and inversion calculation processes. In this study, a single snapshot technique was used to obtain ac and dc components (Rd_ac, Rd_dc) of diffuse reflectance of turbid media (phantoms and pears). The validation results for the snapshot method indicate that at the spatial frequency of 1000/3  m−1, it achieved the optimal demodulation, by comparison with the results obtained by the commonly used time-domain amplitude demodulation method. Diffusion approximation, artificial neural network, least-squares support vector machine regression (LSSVR), and LSSVR combined with a genetic algorithm (LSSVR+GA) were then used to predict μa and μs′ from the obtained Rd_ac, Rd_dc at the fx of 1000/3  m−1. Validation results indicated that the LSSVR method took the least time to calculate μa and μs′ with high performance. The proposed imaging system and algorithm were implemented for the inspection of a pear bruise. Results indicated that the bruise, which is not obviously distinguishable in original gray maps, can show obvious contrast in calculated μa and μs′ maps, especially in μa maps. Further, the contrast becomes more obvious with the passage of time. In summary, this study developed a low-cost spatial frequency imaging system and matching software that could realize fast detection of optical properties for a pear with the proposed snapshot and LSSVR algorithms.