Fractal box-counting technique for shelf life study of grapes by laser speckle image processing

Abstract

Background: In agriculture, it is essential to follow the ripening of fruits and vegetables which is a subject of interest economically. The use of optical non-destructive method is the most suitable technique for evaluating the ripening stage of fruits when they ripen off-tree and eventually to predict the optimum storage life. Many methods are recently developed in optical image processing. The texture correlation function and the fractal box counting (FBC) of biospeckle pattern have been described. Materials and Methods: The dynamic speckle patterns known as boiling speckle are produced by a coherent light illumination incident on the active material of biological tissue. A high coherent laser source He-Ne with 632 nm with neutral density filter and charge-coupled device camera are the major components of the experimental setup. The same experiment may be done by a green laser of wavelength 541 nm (green color). The same procedure continues to take the speckle images in periodically. Results and Discussion: With the help of FBC method in image processing technique, we can assess optically rough surface fruits such as grapes in this work. According to the FBC theory, the speckle images (R1) give a binary counting value D = 1.7640 at the initial stage. Gray image converted into binary image which gives the fractal counting value D = 1.7554 at later on phase. It means that the specimen (grapes) becomes dry periodically and its value is affected by the surrounding environmental condition. Conclusion: Using the dynamic speckle phenomenon or biospeckle method, we demonstrated the assessment of shelf life activity of grapes. The visual phase of the autocorrelation function gives reliable results showing the variation in activity because of the internal changes caused by decreasing water content and then becomes dry grape stage. The correlation function of speckle patternand the Fractal Box Counting (FBC) technique has been proposed as a tool to estimate the postharvest stage of grapes. The bioactivities of fruits and vegetable materials are based on Brownian motion, due to subcellular organs. This indicates the senescence or biological aging characteristics. The quantification of the biospeckle phenomena is associated with the moment of inertia, time history of speckle pattern and grey level co-occurrence matrix. We proposed a new FBC technique to assess the shelf life of grapes.