Detection of apple fruit damages through Raman spectroscopy with cascade forest

Apple fruit damages seriously cause product and economic losses, infringe consumer rights and interests, and have harmful effects on human and livestock health. In this study, Raman spectroscopy (RS) and cascade forest (CForest) were adopted to determine apple fruit damages. First, the RS spectra of healthy, bruised, Rhizopus-infected, and Botrytis-infected apples were measured. Spectral changes and band attribution were analyzed. Different modeling methods were combined with various pre-processing and dimension reduction methods to construct recognition models. Among all models, CForest constructed with full spectra processed by Savitsky-Golay smoothing obtained the best performance with accuracies of 100%, 91.96%, and 92.80% in the training, validation, and test sets (ACC_TE). And the modeling time is reduced to 1/3 of the full-spectra model with a similar ACC_TE of 91.56% after principal component analysis. Overall, RS and CForest provided a non-destructive, rapid, and accurate identification of apple fruit damages and could be used in disease recognition and safety assurance of other fruits.