Assessment of fruits during shelf-life storage using biospeckle laser

Abstract

Biospeckle is a phenomenon that interprets an optical pattern formed by illuminating a surface under changes with coherent light.  These patterns are usually analyzed by numerical as well as graphical methods.  Present work evaluated the application of different numerical methods to analyze biospeckle for the assessment of fresh mature fruits.  Quantitative first and second order moments namely Inertia moment (IM) and Absolute Values of Differences (AVD), based on the recording of time history of speckle pattern were used.  Results showed that during shelf-life storage of ten days of different fruits, the IM and AVD values were found to decrease.  In addition, to assess the impact of ripening of fruits on their optical properties, speckle grain size was measured and the variation of its dimensions evaluated.  This implied that speckle grain size evaluation could be a non-destructive evaluation of their maturity.

Keywords: biospeckle, fruit, speckle grain, inertia moment, absolute value of the differences