ABSTRACT
Fruits and vegetables are a major category of food products in the human diet for their nutritional value and health benefits. Quality assessment of fruits and vegetables is of increasing importance in the ever more competitive global and domestic markets. A considerable amount of effort has been invested in developing methods to measure the quality and composition of food in general, and fruits and vegetables in particular. Except the external quality of fruits and vegetables, internal quality is commonly assessed by destructive techniques, which includes chemical, physical, and mechanical properties. However, there is an increasing demand for nondestructive detection at both research and commercial application levels, because of the importance of determining the optimum time for harvest, monitoring the changes of postharvest quality and composition during storage, and sorting and grading the internal quality of individual pieces of fruits and vegetables at the packinghouse.
