Fast and simultaneous prediction of inner quality parameters on intact mangos by near infrared spectroscopy: Impact of spectra pre-processing on prediction accuracy

Near infrared spectroscopy or known as NIRS has been widely employed in many fields including agriculture, especially for sorting and grading of agricultural products. Spectra pre-processing is one of the main factors affecting model accuracy and prediction capabilities of NIRS. The objective of the present study was to study the impact of different spectra corrections namely mean centering (MC), mean normalization (MN), de-trending (DT), multiplicative scatter correction (MSC), standard normal variate (SNV) and orthogonal signal correction (OSC), to the prediction accuracy of quality parameters: titratable acidity (TA) and soluble solids content (SSC) in intact mango. A total of 91 mango samples (cv. Kent) were used as dataset for calibration and external prediction which was separated by means of systematic sampling based on a property (SSBP) approach. Diffuse reflectance spectra (log1/R) were acquired and recorded in wavelength range of 1000 – 2500 nm by Antaris Fourier transform NIR instrument. Judging from calibration and prediction performance, MSC found to be the best spectra pre-processing method prior to prediction model development with R² prediction are 0.72 for TA and 0.76 for SSC. Although MSC increase the prediction performances based on R², RMSE, RPD and RER metrics compared to the baseline, the achieved RPD, 1.9 for TA and 1.8 for SSC of this findings are still poor and need improvements to achieve even higher levels of accuracy and reliability necessitates for real-time applications.