Prediction of the ripening stages of papayas using discriminant analysis and support vector machine algorithms

BACKGROUND: Evaluation of the quality properties of papaya becomes essential due to the acceleration of the fruit shelf-life senescence and the deterioration factor of the expected postharvest operations. In this study, the colour features in RGB, normalised RGB, HSV and L*a*b* channels were extracted and correlated with mechanical properties, moisture content (MC), total soluble solids (TSS), and pH for the prediction of quality properties at five ripening stages of papaya (R1- R5).

RESULTS: The mean values of colour features in RGB R m , G m , B m , normalised RGB R nm , G nm , B nm HSV H m , S m , V m , and L*a*b* L m , a m , b m were the best estimator for predicting TSS with R2 ≥ 0.90. All colour channels also showed satisfactory accuracies of R2 ≥ 0.80 in predicting the bioyield force, apparent modulus and mean force. The highest average classification accuracy was obtained using LDA with an average accuracy of more than 82%. The study showed that LDA, LSVM, QDA and QSVM obtained the correct classification of up to 100% for R5, whereas R1, R2, R3 and R4 gave classification accuracies in the range between 83.75-91.85%, 85.6-90.25%, 85.75-90.85% and 77.35-87.15% respectively. This indicates R5 colour information was obviously different from R1-R4. The mean values of the HSV channel indicated the best performance to predict the ripening stages of papaya, compared to RGB, normalised RGB and L*a*b*channels, with an average classification accuracy of more than 80%.

CONCLUSION: The study has shown the versatility of a machine vision system in predicting the quality changes in papaya. The results showed that the machine vision system can be used to predict the ripening stages as well as classifying the fruits into different ripening stages of papayas. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.