A Preliminary Approach to Assess Peach Fruit Texture by Time-Resolved Spectroscopy (TRS)

Most fruits can be modeled for their internal composition as a diffusive medium at visible and near-infrared wavelengths. The low absorption in this spectral range allows exploiting VIS/NIR spectroscopic techniques to probe non-destructively the internal food properties. Time-resolved reflectance spectroscopy (TRS), in particular, allows the separate, but simultaneous estimation of absorption and scattering coefficients. Absorption and scattering properties give very different information about the medium investigated. The possibility of applying TRS to assess the texture type of peach fruit was tested. To this purpose, an instrument for TRS developed at Politecnico di Milano-Department of Physics, was exploited. At least two cultivars for each peach flesh phenotype (melting, non-melting, stony hard and slow melting) and a total of 30 fruits for each cultivar were analyzed over the spectral range 540-940 nm.