Over the past decades, imaging and spectroscopy techniques have been rapidly developing and widely applied in nondestructive fruit and vegetable quality assessment. The physical properties (including size, shape, color, position, and temperature) and biological properties (including cultivar, season, maturity level and geographical origin) of fruits and vegetables vary from one to another. A great variety of physical and biological properties of agricultural products influence the optical propagation properties and interaction behaviors with incident light, thus decreasing the quality inspection accuracy. Many attempts have been made in image correction and spectral compensation methods to improve the inspection accuracy. This paper gives a detailed summary about influence of physical and biological variability, as well as the correction and compensation methods for eliminating or reducing the effects in fruit and vegetable quality nondestructive inspection by using imaging and spectroscopy techniques. The advantages and disadvantages of the solution methods are discussed and summarized. Additionally, the future challenges and potential trends are also reported.

We synthesize the colloidal carbon/graphene quantum dots 1–9 nm in diameter and study their photoluminescence properties. Surprisingly, the luminescence properties of a fixed collection of colloidal carbon quantum dots can be systematically changed as the concentration varies. A model based on photon reabsorption is proposed which explains well the experiment. Infrared spectral study indicates that the surfaces of the carbon quantum dots are substantially terminated by oxygen atoms, which causes their ultra-high hydrophilicity. Our result clarifies the mystery of distinct emission colors in carbon quantum dots and indicates that photon reabsorption can strongly affect the luminescence properties of colloidal nanocrystals.

The surface defect that results in the usually observed blue luminescence in the SiC quantum dots (QDs) remains unclear. We experimentally identify that the surface defect C=O (in COO) is responsible for this constant blue luminescence. The HO···C=O [n_(OH) → π*_(CO)] interaction between the hydroxyl and carbonyl groups changes the energy levels of C=O and makes the light absorption/emission arise at around 326/438 nm. Another surface defect (Si–Si) is identified and its light absorption contributes to both C=O-related luminescence and quantum-confinement luminescence of the SiC QDs.

Scattering hyperspectral technology is a nondestructive testing method with many advantages. Here, we propose a method to improve the accuracy of egg freshness, research the influence of incident angles of light source on the accuracy, and explain its mechanism. A variety of weak classifiers classify eggs based on the spectra after preprocessing and feature wavelength extraction to obtain three classifiers with the highest accuracy. The three classifiers are used as metamodels of stacking ensemble learning to improve the highest accuracy from 96.25% to 100%. Moreover, the highest accuracy of scattering, reflection, transmission, and mixed hyperspectral of eggs are 100.00%, 88.75%, 95.00%, and 96.25%, respectively, indicating that the scattering hyperspectral for egg freshness detection is better than that of the others. In addition, the accuracy is inversely proportional to the angle of incidence, i.e., the smaller the incident angle, the camera collects a larger proportion of scattering light, which contains more biochemical parameters of an egg than that of reflection and transmission. These results are very important for improving the accuracy of non-destructive testing and for selecting the incident angle of a light source, and they have potential applications for online non-destructive testing.

Phase transformation can occur among different SiC polytypes under extreme conditions such as high pressure or temperature. It remains unknown whether phase transformation can occur under normal conditions. We demonstrate that the α → β phase transformation can occur at ambient temperature and pressure in nanoscale SiC. The microstructural characterization and light absorption and emission spectroscopy demonstrate the occurrence of this phase transformation. It is found that the quantum-confinement luminescence dominates in larger SiC quantum dots (QDs) and the surface-defect luminescence dominates in ultrasmall SiC QDs. The rare phenomenon of multiple-phonon-assisted light absorption is observed in the SiC QDs.

We observed stable photoluminescence from close-packed cubic SiC nanocrystals that are self-assembled into thin solid film. The peak wavelength shifts from blue to near UV with increasing excitation energy and follows well the quantum-confinement effect. The photoluminescence excitation spectrum indicates a 3.47 eV bandgap corresponding to a particle size of 2.3 nm. The nanocrystal film shows triple-exponential photoluminescence decay with lifetimes of 2.3, 8.5, and 36.9 ns. The results open the possibility of the solid state UV-blue light emitting by use of the SiC nanocrystals in photonics and photonics/electronics integration.