Near-Infrared Hyperspectral Imaging Rapidly Detects the Decay of Postharvest Strawberry Based on Water-Soluble Sugar Analysis

This paper presents a novel strategy to detect the fungal decay in strawberry using reflectance near-infrared hyperspectral imaging (NIR-HSI, 1000–2500 nm). The variation of fructose, glucose, sucrose, and total water-soluble sugar (TWSS) content was analyzed using HPLC with a reference method during fungal infection in strawberry. The feasibility of quantifying sugar constituents relevant to the different stages of decay in strawberry was evaluated using NIR-HSI with key wavelengths selected via successive projection algorithm. The results showed that the predicted performance of TWSS content was acceptable within 0.807 for R p 2 and 2.603 for RPD, respectively. Five to seven key wavelengths were obtained based on sugar constituents, and excellent performance for classification accuracy among the three stages of decay was 89.4 to 95.4% for calibration and 87.0 to 94.4% for prediction, respectively. This rapid approach provides a new strategy for the selection of key wavelengths to detect the decay and sugar constituents in strawberries.