Abstract

The paper describes the developed hardware and software components of a computer vision systemthat extractscolour parameters from calibrated colour images and identifies non-destructively the different quality levels exhibitedby lettuce (either whole or fresh-cut) during storage. Several colour parameters extracted by computervision system have been evaluated to characterize the product quality levels. Among these, brown on total andbrown on white proved to achieve a good identification of the different quality levels on whole and fresh-cut lettuce(P-value b 0.0001). In particular, these two parameters were able to discriminate three levels: very good orgood products (quality levels from 5 to 4), samples at the limit of marketability (quality level of 3) and wasteitems (quality levels from 2 to 1). Quality levels were also chemically and physically characterized. Among theparameters analysed, ammonia content proved to discriminate the marketable samples from the waste in bothproduct's typologies (either fresh-cut or whole); even the two classes of waste were well discriminated byammonia content (P-value b 0.0001).A function that infers quality levels from the extracted colour parameters has been identified using a multiregressionmodel (R2 = 0.77). Multi-regression also identified a function that predicts the level of ammonia(an indicator of senescence) in the iceberg lettuce from a colour parameter provided by the computer visionsystem (R2 = 0.73), allowing a non-destructive evaluation of a chemical parameter that is particularly usefulfor the objective assessment of lettuce quality.The developed computer vision system offers flexible and simple non-destructive tool that can be employed inthe food processing industry to monitor the quality and shelf life of whole and fresh-cut lettuce in a reliable,objective and quantitative way.

Autore Pugliese

• Pace Bernardo , Cefola Maria , Attolico Giovanni

Tutti gli autori

• Pace B.; Cefola M.; Da Pelo P.; Renna F.; Attolico G.

Titolo volume/Rivista

Food research international

Anno di pubblicazione

2014

ISSN

0963-9969

ISBN

Non Disponibile

Numero di citazioni Wos

Nessuna citazione

Ultimo Aggiornamento Citazioni

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Numero di citazioni Scopus

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Ultimo Aggiornamento Citazioni

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Settori ERC

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Codici ASJC

Non Disponibile