Bruising is one of the main problems in the post-harvest grading and processing of ‘Zaozhong 6’ loquats, reducing the economic value of loquats, and even food quality and safety problems are caused by it. Therefore, one of the main tasks in the post-harvest processing of loquats is to detect whether loquats are bruised, as well as the degree of bruising of loquats, to reduce the loss by proper treatment. An appropriate dimensionality reduction method can be used to reduce the redundancy of variables and improve the detection speed. The multispectral analysis method (MAM) has the advantage of accurate, rapid, and nondestructive detection, which was proposed to identify the different bruising degrees of loquats in this study. Firstly, the visible and near-infrared region (Vis–NIR, 400–1000 nm), the visible region (Vis, 400–780 nm), and the near-infrared region (NIR, 781–1000 nm) were analyzed using principal component analysis (PCA) to obtain the spectral regions and PC vectors, which could be used to effectively distinguish bruised loquats from normal loquats. Then, based on the selected second PC (PC2) score images, a morphological segmentation method (MSM) was proposed to distinguish bruised loquats from normal loquats. Furthermore, the weight coefficients of corresponding wavelength points of different degrees of bruising of loquats were analyzed, and the local extreme points and both sides of the interval were selected as the characteristic wavelength points for multi-spectral image processing. A gray level co-occurrence matrix (GLCM) was used to extract texture features and gray information from two-band ratio images K_782/999. Finally, the MAM was proposed to detect the degree of bruising of loquats, which included the spectral data of three characteristic wavelength points in the NIR region coupled with texture features of the two-band ratio images, and the classification accuracy was 91.3%. This study shows that the MAM can be used as an effective dimensionality reduction method. The method not only improves the effect of prediction but also simplifies the process of prediction and ensures the accuracy of classification. The MSM can be used for rapid detection of normal and bruised fruits, and the MAM can be used to classify the degree of bruising of bruised fruits. Consequently, the processed methods are effective and can be used for the rapid and nondestructive detection of the degree of bruising of fruit.

Bruise may cause spoilage, reduce commodity economic value, and give rise to food quality and safety concerns. Therefore, it is crucial to detect whether a loquat is bruised and when it is bruised to save storage and transportation costs. At present, the bruise of loquats is mainly discriminated by the operator’s naked eye, which is affected by personal habits, light intensity, and subjective psychological factors. The detection method is time-consuming, inaccurate, inefficient, and difficult to identify the bruise’s time of loquats. Due to the fact that the color features can be used to perform the conditions of the darkened and brownish regions in bruise’s loquats, the combined spectral information and the color features method is proposed to accurately detect the storage time of mild bruise’s loquats in this study. In order to reduce economic losses, different methods are used to deal with the loquats at the corresponding bruise’s time. Loquats with four types of bruise’s time, including 6, 12, 24, and 36 h, are studied. Models with four types of characteristics, including spectral information, RGB features combined with spectral information, HSI features combined with spectral information, and mixed color features combined with spectral information (mixed-spectral), are established based on linear discriminant analysis (LDA), support vector machine (SVM), and least-squares support vector machine (LS-SVM). The investigated 400 independent samples with four bruise’s time conditions are utilized to assess the classification ability of the proposed methods. The results indicate that the Mixed-RBF-LS-SVM model has the lowest errors, and the accuracies of storage time of mild bruise’s loquats at 6, 12, 24, and 36 h are 100%, 92%, 92%, and 100%, respectively. The overall accuracy of the LS-SVM model based on mixed-spectral is 96%, and it demonstrates that the combined spectral information and color features method can be used to accurately detect the bruise’s time of loquats. Finally, the LS-SVM model based on mixed-spectral is optimized by UVE, SPA, CARS, and GA, respectively; it is found that the UVE-LS-SVM model based on mixed-spectral is the best, and the overall accuracy is 92%. It also lays a foundation for future studies about detecting the bruise’s time of fruits with a high-precision, rapid, and nondestructive measurement.

Skin defects are one of the primary problems that occur in post-harvest grading and processing of loquats. The loquats with skin defects will lead to the loquat being easily destroyed during transportation and storage, which will cause the risk of other loquats being infected, affecting the selling price of loquat. In this paper, a method combining band radio image with improved three-phase level set segmentation algorithm (ITPLSSM) is proposed to achieve high accuracy, rapid, and non-destructive detection of skin defects of loquats. Principal component analysis (PCA) was used to find the characteristic wavelength and PC images to distinguish between four types of skin defects. Determine the best band ratio image based on characteristic wavelength. The band ratio image (Q_782/944) based on PC2 image is the best segmented image. Based on Pseudo-color image enhancement, morphological processing, and local clustering criteria, the band ratio image (Q_782/944) has better contrast between defective area and normal area in loquat. Finally, the ITPLSSM was used to segment the processing band ratio image (Q_782/944), with the accuracy is 95.28 %. The proposed ITPLSSM method is effective in distinguishing with four types of skin defects. Meanwhile, it also effectively segments the images with intensity inhomogeneities.