Internal defect scanning of sweet potatoes using interactance spectroscopy

While standard visible-light imaging offers a fast and inexpensive means of quality analysis of horticultural products, it is generally limited to measuring superficial (surface) defects. Using light at longer (near-infrared) or shorter (X-ray) wavelengths enables the detection of superficial tissue bruising and density defects, respectively; however, it does not enable the optical absorption and scattering properties of sub-dermal tissue to be quantified. This paper applies visible and near-infrared interactance spectroscopy to detect internal necrosis in sweetpotatoes and develops a Zemax scattering simulation that models the measured optical signatures for both healthy and necrotic tissue. This study demonstrates that interactance spectroscopy can detect the unique near-infrared optical signatures of necrotic tissues in sweetpotatoes down to a depth of approximately 5±0.5 mm. We anticipate that light scattering measurement methods will represent a significant improvement over the current destructive analysis methods used to assay for internal defects in sweetpotatoes.