Indeed, during cold storage and as fruit ripening approaches,
sugars composition, organic acids and firmness change rapidly
and extensively. Monitoring the evolution of the ripening of fruit
batches can lead to increase biochemical analysis very time-consuming.
Hence, there is a need to develop rapid methods for fruit
quality assessment and to integrate them into automatic grading
robotic devices for quality control of fruit samples representative
of commercial batches.
Physical methods are increasingly used to characterize and assess,
often non-destructively, product maturity and quality for various
fruits and vegetables. On line sorting equipment integrated
into fruit handling chains and automatic grading equipment for quality control approval of commercial batches are now supplied
at a commercial scale. Among these physical methods, optical
and spectroscopic methods have been the subject of extensive
investigations in the recent years. As an example, near infrared
spectroscopy (NIRS) has been proposed to evaluate non-destructively
the content of the major constituents of fruits and vegetables
(soluble solids, dry matter, sugars, organic acids, etc.) for various
products (Nicolai et al., 2007; Walsh, 2005)