Computers and Electronics in Agriculture 56 (2007) 113

Combination of chemometric tools and image processing

for bruise detection on apples
Juan Xing a,b, , Wouter Saeys a , Josse De Baerdemaeker a
a Division of Mechatronics, Biostatistics and Sensors, Catholic University of Leuven,
Kasteelpark Arenberg 30, B-3001, Heverlee (Leuven), Belgium
b Department of Bioresource Engineering, McGill University, 21,111 Lakeshore Road,
Ste-Anne-de-Bellevue, Quebec H9X 3V9, Canada
Received 2 July 2006; received in revised form 13 December 2006; accepted 13 December 2006

Abstract
In this paper, an experiment of using a hyperspectral imaging system for bruise detection on Golden Delicious apples is
reported. The hyperspectral imaging system was built in the wavelength region between 400 and 1000 nm. Chemometric tools such
as PCA and PLSDA were used to extract and summarize the spectral information from the hyperspectral images. Image processing
methods made it possible to segment the region-of-interest according to the spatial features. Classification algorithms based on PCA
and PLSDA results were developed, respectively. Their performance with respect to the classification accuracy and feasibility to
implement on-line sorting were compared.
The chemometric tools are able to extract and summarize the pixel-based information, while the image processing methods provide
region-based analysis to efficiently segment differences of the apple surface. This combination of image processing techniques and
chemometric tools provides a very promising approach for studying the quality of apples.
2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Multispectral imaging; PCA; PLSDA; Image processing

1. Introduction

Apples are living and perishable commodities. The presence of mechanical damages (e.g. bruises) affects not only
the appearance of the apples, which is an important quality index, but also accelerates fruit spoilage. Thus, effective
removal of damaged products maintains the quality of the entire lot and is therefore essential to the fruit and vegetable
sector of the economy.
Bruise is the most common surface injury recorded on all fruit types, including apples. It is usually recognized as
brown spots on apples. Moreover, bruising seems to be almost unavoidable in postharvest handling (Knee, 2002). It is
clear from literature that bruise is an important problem that reduces quality to the consumer and income to industries.
Baritelle and Hyde (2001) stated that an annual payback to fruit and vegetable industries in reducing bruising can be
in billions of dollars worldwide. Therefore, bruises on apples will be used as an example of surface defects to test the
new methodology described in this paper.

Corresponding author at: Department of Bioresource Engineering, McGill University, 21,111 Lakeshore Road, Ste-Anne-de-Bellevue, Quebec

H9X 3V9, Canada.

E-mail address: juan.xing@gmail.com (J. Xing).

0168-1699/$ see front matter 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.compag.2006.12.002
2 J. Xing et al. / Computers and Electronics in Agriculture 56 (2007) 113

In some cases simple visual inspection may be sufficient for non-destructive bruise detection. Human inspection and
manual removal have been used in the fruit industry for a long time. However, this system has the inherent problems of
high labour cost, fatigue, inconsistency, variability, and non-availability of trained workers. The availability of fewer
workers and increasing employment costs during the peak harvesting seasons have been identified as the significant
factors demanding automation in the fruit industry (Jayas and Karunakaran, 2005).
In the light of providing a more consistent and objective evaluation of fruit quality, optical approaches, such as
machine vision and spectroscopy, are considered as the most potential methods complementary to the human inspectors
on the automatic fruit sorting line (Shewfelt and Prussia, 1993). Machine vision has success in categorizing fruits with
respect to size, colour and other appearance indices. However, its capacity for detecting surface defects is still limited
and often not reliable (Lu, 2003; Leemans and Destain, 2004). Spectroscopy has been involved in the food research
for dozens of years. Common applications have included not only the quantitative prediction of chemical properties
of agricultural products (Lammertyn et al., 1998; Schmilovitch et al., 2000; Kawamura et al., 2003; Park et al., 2003),
but also the classification of samples into different classes (Park et al., 1998; Moshou et al., 2004). However, since
spectroscopy generally measures an aggregate amount of light reflected or transmitted from a specific area of a sample
(point measurement), it does not contain spatial information about the product.
Hyperspectral imaging is a technique that combines conventional imaging and spectroscopy to acquire both spatial
and spectral information from an object. Because of this combined feature of imaging and spectroscopy, hyperspectral
imaging can enhance and/or expand our capability of detecting some chemical constituents in an object as well as
their spatial distributions. The data collection and processing are, however, still time-consuming, which make it at this
moment impractical for being used on line as such. Vogt et al. (2004) suggested wavelet transforms to shorten the
computation time and to reduce the storage space required. Another approach to make this technique feasible is to
establish a multispectral imaging system based on the analysis of hyperspectral images. This can be done by selecting
several optimal filters for the camera or Light Emitting Diode (LEDs) for the illumination, which correspond to the
relevant wavebands for the measurement of the property changes of fruits.
Notwithstanding its limitations, the hyperspectral imaging setup has been favoured as a starting point by researchers
in a wide range of scientific and industrial fields including remote sensing for environmental mapping (Schut et al.,
2002), precision farming (Yang et al., 2001) and microscopic analysis (Schultz et al., 2001). Hyperspectral imaging has
also found its application for food quality evaluation and safety inspection: chicken carcasses (Chao et al., 2001; Yang
et al., 2005), poultry carcasses (Park et al., 2002; Lawrence et al., 2003), vegetables (Cheng et al., 2003), and apples
(Kim et al., 2001; Kavdir and Guyer, 2002; Xing et al., 2005). The objective of this paper is to develop methodologies
to combine chemometric tools and image processing methods to detect bruises on apples.

2. Material and methods

In the case of bruise detection on apples the algorithm should not only be able to detect whether there is a bruise,
but also to localize where the defect is situated. The chemometric treatments of the hyperspectral imaging data are on
the one hand to concentrate the information; and on the other hand to enhance the contrast between the damaged and
sound tissue. After that, image processing techniques are used to segment the bruised regions on apple surfaces.

2.1. Sampling

Fifty-nine Golden Delicious apples with a normal green colour were purchased from a local supermarket in
Leuven (Belgium). The apples were separated into two groups by visual inspection: non-bruised and bruised. Most of
the bruises were detected on the cheeks of the apples and showed the typical browning symptoms. Another sixty-nine
Golden Delicious apples were hand harvested from the university orchard in Rillaar (Belgium). They were free from
bruises. One day after arrival at the laboratory, these apples were impacted with a pendulum device (Van Zeebroeck et
al., 2003) with energy of about 0.11 J in the midway between the calyx and stem end to get controlled bruises. After
the impact, the apples were stored at room temperature (20 C) for 24 h before being measured.

2.2. Hyperspectral imaging system

The optical components of the hyperspectral imaging system mainly consist of a monochrome camera Hitachi
KP-F120 (Hitachi Denshi Ltd., UK) and a Specim V10 spectrograph (Spectral Imaging Ltd., Oulu, Finland). The
 J. Xing et al. / Computers and Electronics in Agriculture 56 (2007) 113 3

wavelength sensitivity of the optical system ranges from 400 to 1000 nm. The resolution of the image acquisition
system was 800 1040 pixels by 10 bits. This corresponds to a spatial resolution of 0.15 mm and a spectral resolution
of 0.7 nm. The camera and spectrograph were used to scan the apples line-by-line as a precise linear transportation plate
moved the apples through the field of view of the optical system. The lighting module used two 150 W halogen linear
lamps. They were arranged toward the field of view of the optics, backward and forward, for providing near-uniform
linear illumination to the sample. After finishing the scans on one entire apple, the spatial-by-spectral matrices were
combined to construct a 3D spatial and spectral data space. More details about the construction and calibration of the
hyperspectral imaging system are given by Xing et al. (2005).

2.3. Statistical methods

2.3.1. Principal components analysis (PCA)

Principal components analysis is a very effective data reduction technique for spectroscopic data. It summarizes
data by forming new variables, which are uncorrelated, linear combinations of the original variables. A few of these
new variables (principal components) represent the larger part of the common variations among all the data. By means
of a few principal components, the high dimensional spectral data can be reduced to a lower dimensionality with a
minimal loss of information. In this study, PCA was applied on the apple pixels to aid in visualising the hyperspectral
data and to select the suitable wavebands for a multispectral imaging system.

2.3.2. Partial least square discriminant analysis (PLSDA)

The objective of PLSDA is to find models that allow the maximum separation among classes of samples (Wang
et al., 1999; Roussel et al., 2003; Musumarra et al., 2004). A dummy variable can be constructed, representing the
sample properties (e.g., healthy = 1, bruised = 0) and then be used as Y-variable. The prediction from a PLSDA model
is a value of nominally zero or one. A value close to zero indicates the new sample is not in the modelled class (i.e.,
the healthy class in this case); a value close to one indicates a sample is in the modelled class. In practice, a threshold
is determined, above which a sample is considered to be in the class and below which a sample is not in the class.
Two types of output of the PLSDA procedure were surveyed: the prediction value and the predicted probability.
The prediction value is the predicted Y value for a new sample, which is the same as in PLS regression. Since this is a
well known technique, no further descriptions are given here. However, the calculation of predicted probability from
PLSDA is necessary to be addressed further.
The probability is calculated in the function plsdthres in Matlab. Basically this function takes the predicted Y values
from the PLSDA model, fits a normal distribution to them and then uses it to calculate the probability of observing a
given Y-value, as follows:
P(Y, 1)
Probability (sample class 1) = (1)
(P(Y, 1) + P(Y, 0))
where Y is the value predicted from the PLSDA model for the sample in question, P(Y, 1) is the probability of measuring
the given Y value for a class 1 sample and P(Y, 0) is the probability of measuring the Y value for a class 0 sample.
The two probabilities used above (P(Y, 1), P(Y, 0)) are estimated from the Y-values observed in the calibration data.
If the validation data have different attributes from the calibration dataset, the predicted probability is very likely to be
biased and consequently influences the final decision making procedure. A more extensive discussion of this will be
given in Section 3.2.4.

2.4. Image processing methods

Image segmentation is one of the most important steps in image processing, as subsequent extracted data are highly
dependent on the accuracy of this operation. Its main aim is to divide an image into regions that have a strong correlation
with objects or areas of interest. Thresholding is a simple and fast technique for characterizing image regions based on
constant reflectivity or light absorption of their surfaces. It is a particularly effective technique for scenes containing
solid objects resting upon a contrasting background, which distinguishes the object from the remaining part of an image
with an optimal threshold value.
4 J. Xing et al. / Computers and Electronics in Agriculture 56 (2007) 113

Two thresholding methods were tested in this experiment. The first one is rather simple, because it chooses the
mid-value of an image as a threshold. The mid-value is calculated as the half of the sum of maximum and minimum
prediction of each apple. The values of images are then compared with this threshold value. Ones are assigned to the
regions with higher value and zeros to the regions with lower values; and vice versa. The second one, which is called
moments, is an automatic thresholding method, which is based on the hypothesis that the observed image is a blurred
version of the theoretically binary original. The blurring that is produced from the acquisition process is treated as if
the statistical moments (average and variance) were the same for both the blurred image and the original image. This
function recalculates a theoretical binary image (IMAQ, NI, USA).

2.5. Software

The image capturing and automatic thresholding program was developed in Labview v7.1 (National Instrument
Corporation, Austin, USA); while all computations, chemometric analyses and graphics were executed with programs
developed in Matlab v6.5 (The MathWorks Inc., Natick, USA) with the PLS Toolbox 3.5 (Eigenvector Research, Inc.).

3. Results and discussion

Since the hyperspectral imaging data includes both the spatial and spectral information, each pixel on an apple
corresponds to one spectrum. The representative calibrated reflectance spectra obtained from this hyperspectral imaging
system are demonstrated in Fig. 1. On each apple, more than 1000 reflectance spectra can be recorded. The high quantity
of spectra makes it interesting to apply chemometric tools, like PCA and PLSDA, on the hyperspectral imaging data
to extract and concentrate useful information.
Before performing PCA or PLSDA, the background and the low-intensity regions around the boundary of an apple
were segmented by a simple thresholding method. Therefore, the following analysis was carried out on the pixels on
apples only.

3.1. Results and discussion based on PCA

3.1.1. Principal components analysis on the hyperspectral imaging data

Principal components analysis was applied to the reflectance spectra of each apple after background removal.
According to the loadings plot of principal components, four suitable wavebands (7 nm bandwidth) centred at 558,

Fig. 1. Representative spectra of bruised and sound apples after wavelength and reflectance calibration.
 J. Xing et al. / Computers and Electronics in Agriculture 56 (2007) 113 5

Fig. 2. Example of PCA scores images using the selected four wavebands: PC1, 2, 3, 4 is the abbreviation of the first, second, third and fourth
principal component, respectively.

678, 728 and 892 nm, respectively, were chosen for bruise detection on Golden Delicious apples (Xing et al., 2005).
Principal components analysis was then carried out on the four effective wavebands instead of the full wavelength
range. After that, the scores of principal components were used to construct virtual images, which is then called as
PCA scores image. If the first principal component (PC1) scores were used, the resultant image was then called PC1
scores image. If the second principal component (PC2) scores were manipulated, it was called PC2 scores image;
and so on. The advantage of using principal component scores images is that each of these uncorrelated virtual images
efficiently displays a large part of the intensity variation at multiple wavebands between different apple tissues. As can
be seen in Fig. 2, PC1 scores images mainly account for the effects of illumination condition, which is associated with
the height profile of the apple surface; whereas, PC2 or PC3 scores images are good for discriminating bruises from
sound tissues.

3.1.2. Classication algorithm

As seen in Fig. 2, the bruises can be identified clearly either on PC2 or on PC3 scores images. In order to simplify
the decision making procedure, a normalization and a combination algorithm have been developed to combine the
information from these two principal components scores images. First, each PCA scores image is normalized by using
the following equation:
PCi min(PCi )
PCi,norm = (2)
max(PCi ) min(PCi )
where PCi is the ith principal component scores image; min(PCi ) is the minimum value of the PCi scores image;
max(PCi ) is the maximum value of PCi scores image; and PCi,norm is the normalized PCi scores image.
6 J. Xing et al. / Computers and Electronics in Agriculture 56 (2007) 113

Table 1
Classification results based on PCA
Actual class Classified as

Sound Bruised

Sound, n = 62 58 (93.55%) 4
Bruised, n = 66 9 57 (86.36%)

n, the number of samples.

The normalized PCA scores images are then combined as follows:

PC3,norm PC2,norm
PC23 = (3)
PC3,norm + PC2,norm
where PC23 is the combination of the PC2 and PC3 normalized scores images; PC2,norm is the normalized PC2 scores
image; and PC3,norm is the normalized PC3 scores image.
The moments thresholding method was then used to process the virtual PC23 images. Since most of the small
or elongate areas most likely do not belong to the bruised tissue, they should not be considered as the region of
interest. Therefore, the binary images obtained from the moments thresholding procedure were further processed using
morphological methods to remove such areas. If the remained area is larger than a certain value, a sample will be
classified as a bruised apple; otherwise, it is sound (Xing et al., 2005). Fig. 3 demonstrates the results of the image
processing for three sound and three bruised apples. After applying this classification algorithm on the images obtained
from the 128 apples, about 93.55% of the 62 non-bruised apples were recognized as sound; and about 86% accuracy
for bruises was obtained (Table 1).

3.2. Results and discussion based on PLSDA

3.2.1. Calibration of PLSDA model

Different from PCA, a model has to be built in a PLSDA procedure prior to doing the prediction for new samples.
To construct a calibration dataset, the regions of bruised and sound tissue on apples were manually selected based
on the reflectance image of apples at 730 nm. The selected regions included 16,006 and 25,779 pixels from the
bruised and sound tissue, respectively, which means there were 41,785 (=16,006 + 25,779) spectra collected for the
calibration dataset. The pixels from the bruised regions were assigned a Y value of 0 and the pixels from the sound
tissue were given a Y value of 1. To get rid of the irrelevant variations in the data, such as uneven illumination on
sample surface, a maximum normalization pre-treatment was applied on the spectrum of each pixel on the apple
surface, which means that each spectrum was divided by its own maximum value. The ones and zeros are then used as
regressand (Y-variable) in building the PLSDA model. The normalized reflectance spectra were taken as the regressors
(X-variable).
Similar to what was done in the PCA procedure, the loadings plot of PLS latent variables (PLSLV) was used to
determine the effective wavebands for discrimination. The peaks of the first four latent variables are quite similar
to those of the principal components (data not shown here). Therefore, the four wavebands selected in the previous
section (558, 678, 728 and 892 nm) will be used in this section as well in order to keep consistency between both
analyses. Afterwards, the PLSDA model was rebuilt with these four wavebands only and it was saved for predicting
new samples.

3.2.2. Prediction of the presence/absence of bruises on apples using PLSDA

For the prediction of bruises in new samples, the pretreatment of maximum normalization was also applied on their
spectra. Similar to what was carried out with the PCA scores image, two kinds of virtual images were constructed
from the outputs of PLSDA, either using the PLS prediction value or the predicted probabilities. For these two types
of virtual images, there is no need for a sophisticated thresholding method, like moments. The simple thresholding
method was employed. In the virtual PLSDA output images, if the value of one pixel is larger than a threshold value,
the pixel is given a value of 0; otherwise, a 1 is assigned. For the PLSDA prediction value image, the threshold value
 J. Xing et al. / Computers and Electronics in Agriculture 56 (2007) 113 7

Fig. 3. Results after applying image processing methods on the combination of PCA scores images (a) examples of three sound apples; (b) examples
of three bruised apples; The further image processing includes some morphological operations for the binary images obtained from previous step.
8 J. Xing et al. / Computers and Electronics in Agriculture 56 (2007) 113

Fig. 4. PLSDA prediction images and corresponding thresholding images of three sound apples (a) and three bruised apples (b).

was set as the mid-value of prediction values, which is the half of the sum of maximum and minimum prediction of
each apple; and for a predicted probability image, 0.5 was used as the threshold.

3.2.3. Classication results from the PLSDA prediction images

By arranging the prediction values for each pixel on an apple, a virtual PLSDA prediction image can be created. Fig. 4
displays some example images of sound and bruised apples constructed with PLSDA prediction values, respectively.
For clear demonstration, in the examples of binary image, the bruised spots are shown in white in the image and the
sound tissues are in black in the image. The bruised samples are the same as those shown in Fig. 3.
It can be seen clearly that the PLSDA prediction images are different from the PCA scores images: the topographic
information is no longer observable. The intensity change in the PLSDA prediction image is more dependent on the
contrast of different tissues instead of the height profile of apple surface. In the resultant images for the sound apples
(Fig. 4a), the predicted value for each pixel is rather even and the illumination effects can no longer be observed. In
the images of bruised apples (Fig. 4b), the injured regions have obvious contrast with the sound tissues, which lead
to very clear and clean segmentation images with the simple thresholding method. This is an advantage of using the
PLSDA technique for bruise detection on apple cheeks.

Table 2a
PLSDA classification results based on the prediction values
Actual class Classified as

Sound Bruised

Sound, n = 53 53 (100%) 0
Bruised, n = 62 11 51 (82.26%)

n, the number of samples.

 J. Xing et al. / Computers and Electronics in Agriculture 56 (2007) 113 9

Table 2b
PLSDA classification results based on the predicted probabilities
Actual class Classified as

Sound Bruised

Sound, n = 53 52 (98.11%) 1
Bruised, n = 62 32 30 (48.39%)

n, the number of samples.

A total of 115 apples were tested with the PLSDA procedure for model validation (without including the apples
used for calibration). The classification table is given in Table 2a. All the sound apples and about 82.3% of the bruised
apples were classified correctly.

3.2.4. Classication results from the PLSDA probability images

The same 115 apples were surveyed with the probability images, where the predicted probability value was used
instead of the prediction value to construct the virtual images. All the values of the images are between 0 (surely

Fig. 5. Distribution of predicted Y value in the calibration dataset (a) and examples of validation dataset: a bruised apple which may be correctly
predicted (b); a bruised apple which is very likely incorrectly predicted (c); in (a) the light gray bars stand for the sound samples in the calibration
dataset and the black bars stand for the bruised samples.
10 J. Xing et al. / Computers and Electronics in Agriculture 56 (2007) 113

bruised) and 1 (surely sound). For the calibration dataset, the predicted probability values for the sound tissue and
bruised regions were very close to 1 and 0, respectively. The classification results for the validation samples were
however not satisfactory. The classification accuracy is given in Table 2b. The detection of the bruised tissue is rather
low at only 48.39%.
There are large errors in the probability prediction for the bruised tissue. This may imply that the calibration samples
do not represent the validation samples well. As explained in the theory section, the threshold value to calculate the
probability is determined based on the distribution of the Y values of sound and bruised samples in the calibration
dataset. Fig. 5 shows the threshold determination plot made for the calibration dataset of this experiment. According
to the calibration dataset, the threshold value for calculating the probability is about 0.61 (Fig. 5a). However, as can
be seen in Fig. 5b and c, for some bruised samples in the validation dataset, the center of distribution of predicted Y
value shift to around 0 or 1.2. For a sample such as that shown in Fig. 5b, it is more likely classified as bruised apple,
which is correct; however, for a sample such as that shown in Fig. 5c, it has more chance to be assigned to the group
of sound apples, while it is actually a bruised apple. However, this situation is not so bad for prediction value images

Fig. 6. Confusion between the stem-end/calyx regions and the bruises for eight apples while using the PLSDA classification procedure; PLSDA
prediction images with presence of stem-end or calyx (a); threshold the images with the mid-value (=(max(im) + min(im))/2) (b); and the threshold
images with improved threshold value (c).
 J. Xing et al. / Computers and Electronics in Agriculture 56 (2007) 113 11

(like in Fig. 4), even when the validation samples were very different from the calibration samples, the deviations of
the prediction for both the sound and bruised tissues may be shifting to one direction. The relative contrast can be
kept to some extent. Therefore, the classification algorithm based on PLSDA outputs be developed according to the
prediction values rather than the probability values.

3.3. Comparison of PCA and PLSDA procedures

Regarding to the classification accuracy obtained from this study, the algorithm based on PCA gives similar results
to that of PLSDA (based on prediction values). PLSDA has the advantage that no complex image processing is needed.
This may save some time in making a decision for the quality of apples on-line. On the other hand, as reported by
Xing and De Baerdemaeker (2005), the topographic information is useful for separating the stem-end/calyx regions
from the true damaged tissue. The PC1 scores images from the PCA procedure reveal this information well. However,
the geometric information is no longer available in the PLSDA prediction images. In this case, the stem-end/calyx
identification might, therefore, demand for an extra analysis. This problem was investigated on 8 apples. The confusion
between bruise and stem end/calyx is demonstrated in Fig. 6.
As shown in Fig. 6a, the stem-end and calyx regions have low values in the PLSDA prediction images; some-
times these are even lower than those of the damaged tissue. Fig. 6b demonstrates the resultant images of using
the same algorithm as used for the cheek bruise detection. For a better visualization, Fig. 6b is embedded with
gray background. As can be seen, the calyx and stem-end regions are more likely to be retained in the binary
images than the bruised regions. Furthermore, the backgrounds of six images were assigned as 1, which means
that these backgrounds were misrecognized as the interested region (i.e., bruised region on apples in this study).
This indicates that the method to choose the threshold value is no longer appropriate. In the apple cheek images,
the minimum value is the background; however, this does not hold true for most of the images with the presence of
the stem-end or calyx. Therefore, the threshold value determination was adjusted. First of all, a comparison between
the background and the minimum of the image was made. The greater one of these two was then considered for
calculating the threshold value. The binary images with the improved threshold values are shown in Fig. 6c. The
bruises and the stem-end/calyx regions are all retained in the image and it was difficult to separate them further.
With PCA scores images no misclassifications between the stem-end/calyx and the bruises were obtained (Xing et al.,
2004).

4. Conclusion

The hyperspectral imaging system can acquire both spatial and spectral information from an object simul-
taneously. Because of this combined feature of imaging and spectroscopy, hyperspectral imaging can enhance
and expand our capability of detecting some chemical constituents in an object as well as their spatial
distributions.
The bruise detection experiments carried out on Golden Delicious apples with the hyperspectral imaging system
were reported. Chemometric tools, such as PCA and PLSDA, were applied for extracting the useful information from
the hyperspectral imaging data. Four sensitive wavebands (7 nm bandwidth), i.e., centred at 558, 678, 728 and 892 nm,
respectively, were chosen for bruise detection on apples. The results obtained from the chemometric techniques were
used to construct virtual images for further analysis. Afterwards, image processing methods were applied on these
artificial images to aid in classifying samples.
PLSDA does not need complex image processing on the virtual images, which is good for speeding up the inspection
speed. However, PLSDA needs a good training dataset to build a model prior to do the prediction for a new sample.
According to the results achieved in this study, PLSDA does not work as well as PCA scores images for identification
of stem-end/calyx. The performance of PLSDA for separating the stem-end/calyx regions from the true surface defects
could, however, be improved by including the pixels of stem-end/calyx into the model calibration procedure, which was
not done in this study. The algorithm based on PCA results needs more processes for the virtual images to make a final
decision about the properties of samples, whether bruised or not; however, it is easier to distinguish the stem-end/calyx
from the cheek surfaces. Furthermore, the PCA is performed on each individual apple, which means the variations
between different individuals are eliminated so that it is not necessary to make efforts for collecting a representative
calibration dataset.
12 J. Xing et al. / Computers and Electronics in Agriculture 56 (2007) 113

The chemometric tools do not only summarize and concentrate the information carried in the hyperspectral images,
but they also enhance the contrast between the damaged and sound tissue on apples. The spatial features segmented
by image processing methods can in turn help the expert to make a correct evaluation of the quality of apples. This
study based on the hyperspectral imaging setup lays a foundation for later development of a computer vision system
for bruise detection on Golden Delicious apples, as well as for the other similar applications.

Acknowledgements

The authors gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the Catholic University of Leuven. Xing Juan is
currently a Research Associate at the McGill University. Wouter Saeys is funded as a Research Assistant of the
Research FoundationFlanders.

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