Non-destructive assessment of the internal defects of FRED® pear by a low radio-frequency capacitive technique

Postharvest pear fruit internal browning damages were assessed non-destructively using a capacitive instrumental chain in the super low (SLF) – low (LF) radiofrequency region combined with Image analysis. A rapid, inexpensive, and non-destructive instrumental chain was set up: an LCR meter interfaced with a PC receives and transmits signals through a parallel plate capacitor in the frequency range from 100 Hz to 10 kHz. The capacitance data were used to classify the FRED® pear fruit into two classes, “with defects” and “healthy”, using the unsupervised fuzzy C-means clustering analysis. The main results show good classification rates: 91 % of the samples are correctly classified as damaged. Further samples should be implemented to understand how the model performs with samples from different ripening stages. Despite this, the technique appears promising for non-destructive internal quality assessment in pear fruit.