Determination of soluble solids content in tomatoes with different nitrogen levels based on hyperspectral imaging technique

Abstract Tomato is sweet and sour with high nutritional value, and soluble solids content (SSC) is an important indicator of tomato flavor. Due to the different mechanisms of nitrogen uptake and assimilation in plants, exogenous supply of different forms of nitrogen will have different effects on the growth, development, and physiological metabolic processes of tomato, thus affecting the tomato flavor. In this paper, hyperspectral imaging (HSI) technique combined with neural network prediction model was used to predict SSC of tomato under different nitrogen treatments. Competitive adaptive reweighed sampling (CARS) and iterative retained information variable (IRIV) were used to extract the feature wavelengths. Based on the characteristic wavelength, the prediction models of tomato SSC are established by custom convolutional neural network (CNN) model that was constructed and optimized. The results showed that the SSC of tomato was negatively correlated with nitrogen fertilizer concentration. For tomatoes treated with different nitrogen concentrations, the residual predictive deviation (RPD) of CARS‐CNN and IRIV‐parallel convolutional neural networks (PCNN) reached 1.64 and 1.66, both more than 1.6, indicating good model prediction. This study provides technical support for future online nondestructive testing of tomato quality. Practical Application The CARS‐CNN and IRIV‐PCNN were the best data processing model. Four customized convolutional neural networks were used for predictive modeling. The CNN model provides more accurate results than conventional methods.