Nondestructive Detection of Blackheart in Potato by Visible/Near Infrared Transmittance Spectroscopy

Abstract

The possibility of using visible/near infrared (Vis/NIR) transmission spectroscopic technique in the 513–850 nm region coupled with partial least squares-linear discriminant analysis (PLS-LDA) and other chemometric methods to classify potatoes with blackheart was investigated. The discrimination performance of different morphological correction methods, including weight correction, height correction, and volume correction, was compared. The results showed that height corrected transmittance has the best performance, with both calibration and validation sets having a success rate of 97.11%. Out of 1800 wavelengths, only six wavelengths (711, 817, 741, 839, 678, and 698 nm) were selected as the optimum wavelengths for the discrimination of blackheart tubers based on principal component analysis (PCA). The data analysis showed that the overall classification rate by PLS-LDA method decreased from 97.11% to 96.82% in calibration set and from 97.11% to 96.53% in validation set, which was acceptable. The importance of these conclusions may be helpful to transfer Vis/NIR transmission technology from laboratory to industrial application in nondestructive, real-time, or portable measurement of potatoes quality.