Quality measurements of fruits and vegetables using sensor network

Abstract

In India most of the population survival is based on agricultural products. All the business and organizations that make, display, transport or prepare food for sale they will need to check food quality. A quality assessment system is required for farmers, the customer also in the fruit trading centers, to ensure quality of fruits and vegetables. If the fruits, vegetables are rotten, then a quality assessment system should intimate what are the items are not suitable to eat and what items we can keep in the storage so that other items should not get rotten. It will help farmers also, to classify fruits and vegetables as per quality and can easily do pricing of those products. This paper gives an overview about how wireless sensor network is designed and used to solve different problems related to agriculture, such as soil monitoring, Irrigation handling, etc. The same idea is extended to check the quality of agricultural products. Two methodologies used for assessing the quality of foods are destructive and non destructive. In case of destructive method we need to cut and then monitor internal section or take out the juice of fruit. A non destructive method just checks quality based on the external features like weight, color, appearance, etc. Some of the techniques like computer vision, image processing, hyper spectral imaging, etc. are used to assess food quality. As these methods are based on only external features of food item, there is a necessity to bring more accuracy in assessing the quality of food items. With this intention, this work aims to propose an automated framework using a multi sensor network for predicting quality of fruits and vegetables. To increase the availability of data related to research projects, results received from the described framework will be deployed on agriculture cloud.