A multiple sensor system for quality inspection of onions and investigation of onion optical properties

Abstract

Understanding the optical properties of onion tissues is essential to applying optical methods for onion quality inspection. This study estimated the optical properties of dry skin, wet skin, and flesh of red, Vidalia sweet, white, and yellow onions at the wavelength of 633 nm. The total diffuse reflectance, total transmittance, and collimated transmittance of single-layer onion tissues were measured by spectroscopic systems. Based on the measured data, the absorption coefficient ua and reduced scattering coefficient us' of onion tissues were calculated using the inverse adding-doubling method. The results indicated that the dry and wet skins had significantly higher ua and us' than the flesh at 633 nm. For both skins and flesh, the ua varied between cultivars, while the differences of the us' between cultivars were less profound. All types of onion tissues were high-albedo materials at 633 nm. Using the calculated optical properties, Monte Carlo simulations were performed to model the light propagation in 25 different scenarios of multi-layer onion tissues for four cultivars, respectively. The results showed that the incident light at 633 nm would lose 99% of its energy within 6 layers in any of the simulated scenarios, and the light penetrated more layers in the sweet onions than in the other three cultivars. This work provided fundamental understanding of the optical properties of onion tissues and the light propagation in onion bulbs at 633 nm. The investigation of the onion optical properties will be extended to a broader spectrum in the future.