Ripeness and fruit quality are considered as the relevant parameters to evaluate the value of fruits. Ripeness is defined by measurable physiological changes into the fruit metabolism. At contrary, fruit quality is a more global fruit parameter that can not easily be predicted by a certain number of fruit characteristics. In recent years, non-destructive methods to analyse fruit parameters have been subject of extensive researches. The most evident achieved result is that none of the proposed approaches seems to provide all the necessary information to characterise fruits. Therefore, sensor fusion is suggested to be a promising tool to take into account different measurement principles improving the information and, as a consequence, the prediction of ripeness and quality of marketable products. In this paper, an experiment on peaches aimed at fusing together the information acquired by an aroma sensor (electronic nose) and a visible light spectrometer is described. The methodology here proposed showed positive results and provided the evidence that when different sensor information are fused together a general improvement of the knowledge about the samples is obtained.
展开▼