Application of FT- NIR Spectroscopy in Nondestructive Maturity Determination of Shahani Date Fruit

The potential of Fourier Transform Near-infrared (FT-NIR) spectroscopy technique was applied to determine moisture and soluble solids content of Shahani date fruit. Spectral acquisitions were carried out in reflectance mode using a FT-NIR spectrophotometer in the range of 12000- 4000cm-1. Three different preprocessing methods namely: Multiplicative Scatter Correction (MSC), first and second derivatives were employed with their effects on the ability of predictive models compared. The most suitable predictive models resulted from Partial Least Squares (PLS) method showed coefficient of determination (R2) values of 0.977 and 0.973 and root mean square errors of prediction of 1.4% and 1.6 °Brix for the moisture and the soluble solids content, respectively. The relative high Residual Predictive Deviation (RPD) values (7.4 and 6.4 for the moisture and the soluble solids content respectively) showed FT-NIR spectroscopy technique can be applied as a nondestructive, rapid and accurate method for determination of maturity of the Shahani variety date.