New, Low-Cost, Hand-Held Multispectral Device for In-Field Fruit-Ripening Assessment

The state of ripeness at harvest is a key piece of information for growers as it determines the market price of the yield. This has been traditionally assessed by destructive chemical methods, which lead to low-spatiotemporal resolution in the monitorization of crop development and poor responsiveness for growers. These limitations have shifted the focus to remote-sensing, spectroscopy-based approaches. However, most of the research focusing on these approaches has been accomplished with expensive equipment, which is exorbitant for most users. To combat this issue, this work presents a low-cost, hand-held, multispectral device with original hardware specially designed to face the complexity related to in-field use. The proposed device is based on a development board (AS7265x, AMS AG) that has three sensor chips with a spectral response of eighteen channels in a range from 410 to 940 nm. The proposed device was evaluated in a red-grape field experiment. Briefly, it was used to acquire the spectral signature of eighty red-grape samples in the vineyard. Subsequently, the grape samples were analysed using standard chemical methods to generate ground-truth values of ripening status indicators (soluble solid content (SSC) and titratable acidity (TA)). The eighteen pre-process reflectance measurements were used as input for training artificial neural network models to estimate the two target parameters (SSC and TA). The developed estimation models were evaluated through a leave-one-out cross-validation approach obtaining promising results (R² = 0.70, RMSE = 1.21 for SSC; and R² = 0.67, RMSE = 0.91 for TA).