Abstract: Abstract: Tomato has become the most cultivated and consumed vegetable crop in the world, and China has become one of the largest producers and consumers of tomatoes in the world. The pectin content in cell wall of tomato during ripening is closely related to fruit hardness, which is one of the important indicators to determine the maturity and reflect the quality of tomato. The requirement of tomato maturity classification and evaluation promotes the development of non-destructive, fast and accurate detection methods of tomato hardness.Hyperspectral imaging integrates spectroscopy and imaging technology in an analysis system, which transfers tomato maturity assessment from subjective, manual classification and measurement methods. Hyperspectral imaging has been widely used in the rapid acquisition of information to classify, detect or identify the quality of various fruits. A novel method for tomato hardness detection based on hyperspectral imaging and modified interval Random Frog was proposed in this paper. Firstly, hyperspectral images of 120 tomato samples in different mature periods were captured by hyperspectral imaging system covering near-infrared region (865.11nm-1 711.71nm). And the hardness data of tomato was obtained by texture analyzer. Secondly, the spectral data were pretreated by multiplicative scatter correction (MSC) and normalized preprocessing to eliminate noise and improve signal-to-noise ratio. The validity of the characteristic wavelength plays a crucial role in the prediction performance of the model. Therefore, we need an effective method to extract the effective wavelength to improve the accuracy of the model. Interval random frog (iRF) algorithm considers all possible spectral wavelengths and ranks all the wavelengths based on selected probability. But one of the disadvantages of this method is large number of iterations and slow convergence. In view of above disadvantages, the traditional iRF algorithm was optimized in terms of constructing initial variable subset method. A modified interval Random Frog (miRF)was proposed to extract the characteristic wavelength effectively. Finally, a prediction model was developed based on partial least squares regression (PLSR) method to detect tomato hardness. The results indicated that the convergence efficiency and accuracy of miRF has a significantly improvement compared with the iRF method. The iRF has selected 100 feature bands, accounting for 40.65% of the full band, and its runtime was 32.1min. miRF has selected 47 feature bands, accounting for 19.1% of the full band, and its runtime was 1.6 min. It can be seen that miRF greatly reduces the running time of the algorithm. The characteristic wavelengths selected by iRF and miRF methods were mainly distributed in 1 582 nm-1 655 nm, followed by 1 160 nm-1 190 nm and 1 353 nm-1 383 nm, indicating that above regions were sensitive bands to tomato hardness. In order to prove the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm, the results of miRF-PLSR were compared with those of iRF-PLSR and SPA-PLSR. The prediction set correlation coefficients (RP) of the SPA-PLSR model and the iRF-PLSR model were 0.803 9 and 0.936 6 respectively. And the RP of miRF-PLSR model was 0.968 5. The root mean square error (RMSEP) of the SPA-PLSR model and the iRF-PLSR model were 0.007 7 kg/mm2 and 0.004 4 kg/mm2respectively. And the RMSEP of miRF-PLSR model was 0.004 0 kg/mm2. The experiments results show that the miRF-PLSR model has the best prediction results in all models.