A Study on Soluble Solids Content Assessment Using Electronic Nose: Persimmon Fruit Picked on Different Dates

Soluble solids content is an important internal quality attribute in determining fruit maturity and harvesting time. In this study, an electronic nose was used to monitor the soluble solids content based on the change of volatile compounds of persimmon fruit during different picking-dates. Principal component analysis was applied to investigate whether the sensors’ response of the electronic nose was able to distinguish persimmons among different picking dates corresponding to different maturity levels. The loading analysis was used to identify those sensors that contribute most for flavor modeling. The results indicated that the electronic nose could distinguish the different picking dates using principal component analysis. The model testing showed that a support vector machine could achieve better prediction accuracy and generalization than multiple linear regression and back-propagation neural network and the average prediction accuracy, root mean square error, and mean relative error of the soluble solids content. By using support vector machine models were 91.36, 0.71, and 0.58%, respectively, which implied that the electronic nose was effective for soluble solids content prediction of persimmons on the basis of the support vector machine model.