Potential of Near-Infrared (NIR) Spectroscopy and Hyperspectral Imaging for Quality and Safety Assessment of Fruits: an Overview

Daily consumption of fruits has rendered sophisticated techniques for accurate evaluation of its quality and how it can be initiated in a more rapid way has become a state-of-art for the fruit processors and food safety agencies. With the advent of non-destructive techniques in the past two decades, the quality and safety assessment procedure has become more reliable and non-invasive with reasonable accuracy. They have significantly contributed to the quality and safety inspections of fruits allowing for minimal expense of processing systems. The current review provides an overview of the technical aspects used for evaluating the essential physicochemical components in fruits. The non-destructive techniques described in this study primarily constitute near-infrared (NIR) spectroscopy and hyperspectral imaging in addition to their respective data analysis, classification, and calibration methods. First, the individual mechanism is outlined considering spectral/image acquisition mode followed by the extraction of information from the acquired data. Then, potentials of different chemometrics, image processing, and hyperspectral data reduction and feature extraction methods used in both the techniques have been epitomized for predicting the fruit maturity and other internal components such as firmness, acidity, phenolic content, soluble solids, vitamins C, moisture content, defects, fecal contamination, starch index, sugar content, and dry matter. The literature in this overview portrays the potentials of different chemometric and multivariate image analysis methods used in near-infrared spectroscopy and hyperspectral imaging, respectively, as excellent quality assessment aspects for fruits. However, further improvements are required in handling the voluminous data in industrial applications. The application of both the techniques is limited to a few fruits and further research is required for exploiting their implications.