Radiofrequency sensing system for fruit quality evaluation during forced ripening processes

One of the most assessed methodologies in the food sector is the accelerated ripening of climacteric fruits within chambers with controlled environmental and gases conditions. However, nowadays, the management of the process is mainly based on qualitative estimations only, frequently resulting in poor fruits quality and scarce optimization of time and wastes. Following the modern paradigms of Industry 4.0, this contribution proposes a non-destructive RFID-based system for the automatic evaluation of the live ripening of avocados. The system, coupled with a properly trained automatic classification algorithm based on Support Vector Machines (SVMs), can discriminate the early stage of ripening with an accuracy greater than 85%.