Nondestructive Sugar Content Measurement in Apple by Nir Spectrum Analysis using Neural Network

This study was conducted to develop neural networks of predicting the sugar content of fruits based on the optical densities obtained from a spectrophotometer. Pear, apple and peach were used in investigating the feasbility of the developed neural networks as a nondestructive measurement. A spectrophotometer was used to measure the optical densities of test fruits. The neural networks suggested in this study consisted of multi-layers having one hidden layer and one output layer. The correlation coefficients between the predicted and the measured sugar content for most fruits were high. The neural networks using 2nd derivatives of optical density spectrum produced a better results in predicting the sugar content of fruits. This study contributed to develop a method for nondestructively predicting the sugar content of fruits.