A rapid and affordable method is desired by the food industry to monitor the quality of the food. A nondestructive and noninvasive testing is desired to determine the optimum harvesting time, monitor changes during storage, and asses the internal quality of the fruits. Time-resolved reflectance spectroscopy (TRS) is used for noninvasive simultaneous measurement of the scattering and the absorption properties of turbid media. In this article, a time-resolved phase reflectance-based nondestructive and noninvasive method is proposed to monitor the internal quality of the fruits. The time-resolved reflectance is determined by the number of internal scatterers based on the mean-free path length of the incident light. The change in the mean-free path due to change in the pigmentation of the internal pulp changes the order of the scatters and, therefore, affects the scattering profile of the reflected light.
A rapid and affordable method is desired by the food industry to monitor the quality of the food. A nondestructive and noninvasive testing is desired to determine the optimum harvesting time, monitor changes during storage, and asses the internal quality of the fruits. Time-resolved reflectance spectroscopy (TRS) is used for noninvasive simultaneous measurement of the scattering and the absorption properties of turbid media. In this article, a time-resolved phase reflectance-based nondestructive and noninvasive method is proposed to monitor the internal quality of the fruits. The time-resolved reflectance is determined by the number of internal scatterers based on the mean-free path length of the incident light. The change in the mean-free path due to change in the pigmentation of the internal pulp changes the order of the scatters and, therefore, affects the scattering profile of the reflected light.