LOW COST AND LABORATORY SCALE NIR SPECTROSCOPY FOR QUALITY EVALUATION OF FRUITS AND VEGETABLES

Abstract

NIR spectroscopy has proved to be one of the efficient and easy tools to monitor the quality of agricultural products. NIR spectrometers are versatile devices to monitor the ripeness or quality parameters of the fruits. We demonstrate a low-cost spectrometer design that is produced with off the shelf components. In this work, the development, characterization and validation of a prototype is discussed. The proposed device has a dedicated user interface on the PC to plot and analyze spectral data. The performance of the proposed spectrometer is comparable to existing laboratory scale spectrometers in terms of stability and resolution. The spectral resolution and response range of the proposed spectrometer are 20 nm and 640-1050nm, respectively. Proposed device consists of MEMS based Hamamatsu spectrometer sensor (C11708MA), microcontroller (Arduino) and IR light source. Roles of the Arduino are generating essential control signals and sampling output of the C11708MA. These spectral response data have a huge advantage in generating data sets that may be useful in building machine learning based models.