A team of Pakistani scientists has developed a method to detect the sweetness of citrus fruits such as oranges and kino without opening them using artificial intelligence (AI) and visual properties.
This system can predict these sweets with 80% accuracy. Experts from several universities and institutes under the supervision of Dr. Ayesha Zeib, National Center for Robotics and Automation, National University of Science and Technology (NUST), have carried out this important work without harming oranges and related fruits. It can be tasted.
In the first phase, experts plucked 92 fruits of mosambi, red orange and sweet from a farm in Chakwal district. The average peel of these fruits was 6 mm thick.
Circle marks were placed on both sides of each fruit and the spectrum of each fruit was determined from the exact circled area with a manual spectrometer. For this commercially available f A 750 spectrometer that emits near-infrared (near-infrared) light was used.
This light enters the fruit and is reflected back, creating a spectral pattern that is noted. Thus, 64 fruits were used in calibration while 28 fruits were used for prediction and in both of them spectrometer was used as fruit meter.
But first, let’s know what is spectroscopy and what is its importance? Animate and inanimate objects absorb, emit or reflect light. Spectroscopy, which has become an extremely useful process, is now used to find out the details of an object from this light. But our eyes can see a very small part of the spectrum or radiation called visible light.
While angles like X-ray, infrared and ultraviolet etc. are equally important but we cannot see them. In everyday life Spectroscopy not only informs us of a tiny tumor in the brain, but also of a galaxy millions of light years away.
Although spectroscopy has been used to determine fruit quality for years, Pakistani scientists have used it to determine the sweetness of local oranges.
Secondly, this method has succeeded in directly determining sweetness, which is also an important advance. Scientifically, hundreds of unique chemicals combine to make a fruit flavorful.
But generally Brix is a measure of the amount of different types of sugars in a fruit. Be it mango or kino, it is said to be drinkable because of its abundance of sweetness.
But on the other hand, the amount of Titratable Acidity (TA) in oranges etc. is used to measure sourness. This measure indicates the amount of citric acid in a fruit. Scientists first NIR Readings were obtained by spectroscopically measuring fruit samples.
Brix, TA and fruit sweetness (via tongue) were then determined by traditional chemical and tasting methods to be used as reference data. This time the fruit was cut from the same marked circles from where the first spectrum was taken.
