Abstract:
A Crown pear is one of the most primary fresh fruit varieties worldwide, due to the high juice content, sweetness, and rich nutritional value. Among them, the firmness can represent one of the most important quality indicators for pears. It can directly present how ripe the pear is and how well the pear can be stored after harvest. For these reasons, it is often required to accurately measure the firmness of the pear. The conventional measurement of fruit firmness can depend mainly on the destructive tests, including the Magness-Taylor puncture and compression. However, the large amount of food waste cannot fully meet the large-scale testing in recent years. Also, the current studies still share the two challenges, whether the regular prediction has low accuracy or the deep learning is difficult to interpret. This research aims to examine the connection between fruit firmness and vibration frequency in Crown pears. A recognition model was also established using a standard convolutional neural network (CNN). After that, an improved CNN was combined with Deep Shapley Additive Explanations. A series of experiments was carried out to verify the improved model. The 508 Crown pears were taken as the test samples. Five groups were divided for the samples, each of which was tested every thirteen days. Vibration data was gathered from the Crown pears using a Laser Doppler Vibrometer (LDV). An improved one-dimensional CNN was applied to construct a firmness prediction model, according to the characteristic frequencies. Deep Shapley Additive Explanations (Deep SHAP) structure was used to explain the function of the prediction model. Furthermore, a comparison was made of several standard prediction models, including the partial least squares regression, support vector regression, extreme gradient boosting, and adaptive gradient boosting. The results show that the improved one-dimensional CNN model was achieved in the high-precision prediction of the Crown pear hardness. Among them, the feature frequency of the
RP2 was 0.945, the RMSE
P was 0.594 N/mm, and the RPD
P was 4.272. The performance also outperformed all conventional models over all metrics. The most outstanding performance was achieved, where the
R² value was closest to the ideal value of 1, the RMSE was the lowest, was the next-best XGBoost model, and the RPD value was significantly higher than the rest of the models, indicating the superior generalization. The characteristic frequencies were utilized to predict the Crown pear firmness with high accuracy. Vibration frequency features between 300 and 700 Hz shared a strong relationship with the pear firmness. An interpretable deep learning model with the LDV vibration data was achieved in the high-precision prediction for interpretability and practicality. There was a strong correlation between characteristic frequency and firmness. The finding can provide an efficient and reliable non-destructive testing of the Crown pear firmness in the assessment of the fruit quality.