Combining algorithm techniques with mechanical and acoustic profiles for the prediction of apples sensory attributes

The research work shows the potentiality of advanced linear and nonlinear learning algorithm techniques in the prediction of apples texture sensory attributes as “hardness”, “crunchiness”, “flouriness”, “fibrousness”, and “graininess”. Starting from the information contained in the entire mechanical and acoustic curves acquired during samples compression test, the prediction performances of five different statistical tools as Partial Least Squares regression (PLS), Multilayer Perceptron (MLP), Support Vector Regression (SVR) and Gaussian Process Regression (GPR) are shown and discussed.

All Predictive models validations evidence best accuracies for texture sensory attributes “hardness” and “crunchiness” and in general for GPR learning algorithm. By combining mechanical and acoustic profiles, 5-fold cross validations produce values of coefficient of determination R² up to 0.885 (GPR) and 0.840 (GPR), respectively for “hardness” and “crunchiness”. These results, comparable to those obtained by considering a large number of mechanical and acoustic parameters extracted from acquired profiles as predictive factors, evidence a new and reliable way for the prediction of texture sensory attributes of apples. The proposed approach can overcome the necessity to define, in advance, number and type of features to be calculated from instrumental texture profiles and can be easily implemented in an automatic process.