Review: The evolution of chemometrics coupled with near infrared spectroscopy for fruit quality evaluation

Short wave near infrared (NIR) spectroscopy operated in a partial or full transmission geometry and a point spectroscopy mode has been increasingly adopted for evaluation of quality of intact fruit, both on-tree and on-packing lines. The evolution in hardware has been paralleled by an evolution in the modelling techniques employed. This review documents the range of spectral pre-treatments and modelling techniques employed for this application. Over the last three decades, there has been a shift from use of multiple linear regression to partial least squares regression. Attention to model robustness across seasons and instruments has driven a shift to machine learning methods such as artificial neural networks and deep learning in recent years, with this shift enabled by the availability of large and diverse training and test sets.