Detection Method of Apple Mould Core Based on Dielectric Characteristics

Abstract

Apple mouldy core disease often occurs in the ventricle of apples and cannot be effectively identified by appearance. Near-infrared spectroscopy, nuclear magnetic resonance and other methods are usually used in traditional apple mouldy core disease detection, but these methods require complex equipment and high detection costs. In this research, a simple and fast nondestructive detection method of apple mouldy core disease was proposed by using a dielectric method to construct an apple mouldy core disease detection model. Japan's Hioki 3532-50 LCR tester was used to collect 108 dielectric indicators (12 dielectric indicators at 9 frequencies) of 220 apples as the original data. Due to the large differences in the distribution of data collected with different dielectric indexes and different frequencies, a standardized method was used for data preprocessing to eliminate the problem of large differences in dielectric data distribution. Afterwards, in order to eliminate the redundant information between the data, the principal component analysis algorithm was used to reduce the data dimensionality, and finally the three algorithms of BP neural network (BPNN), support vector machine (SVM) and random forest (RF) were used to construct the mouldy core disease detection model. After pre-experiment, the most effective parameters of each algorithm were selected, the test results showed that the apple mouldy core disease detection model based on the RF algorithm obtained the best performance, and the detection accuracy rate reached 96.66% and 95.71% in the training set (150 apples) and the test set (70 apples). The mouldy core disease detection model constructed by using BPNN was the second most effective, and the detection accuracy could reach 94.66% and 94.29%, respectively. The detection effect of the model built by using SVM was relatively poor, and the detection accuracies were 93.33% and 91.43%, respectively. The experimental results showed that the model constructed by using RF can more effectively identify mouldy core disease apples and healthy apples. This study could provide references for apple diseases and insect pests and non-destructive testing of apple quality.

Keywords

• apple mouldy core disease
• dielectric characteristics
• random forest
• bp neural network
• support vector machine