Optical Coherence Tomography for Fruit Health Monitoring & Food Safety

Exploring the use of Optical Coherence Tomography in Fruit Health Monitoring

Objective

• 1. To support agricultural research and food safety by integrating Optical Coherence Tomography for non-destructive assessment for fruit quality. 2. To develop a digital database of OCT images capturing structural variations in few fruit varieties confined to Indian regions.

Description

• We aim to address one of the societal needs and challenges, such as the artificial ripening of fruits using hazardous chemicals, a practice that poses significant health risks to consumers. The primary goal of this project is working towards building compact, efficient, and non-destructive optical techniques in the field of plant and fruit health monitoring.

Impact

• 1. Establish OCT as a reliable, non-invasive tool for fruit health monitoring, enabling diagnosis before visible symptoms appear using depth resolved images and statistical analysis. 2. Create an image database for fruit samples (e.g., Mango, Citrus fruits) which are subjected to artificial and naturally ripened methods (following FSSAI) or suffer degradation as they age (highly dependent on their storage conditions).