Design and development of a portable instrument for the detection of artificial ripening of banana fruit

Health is of great concern for everyone. Eating ripened fruits is a requirement for the good health. Ripening is the process by which fruits attain their desirable flavour, quality, colour, palatable nature and other textural properties. But majority of fruits available in the market are artificially ripened and it is not possible to get naturally ripened fruits. Varieties of chemicals are used to ripen the fruit artificially. Hence, there is an immediate requirement of a robust and precise device to detect artificially ripened fruits. We are proposing a design and development of such device to detect whether given banana is artificially or naturally ripened. It makes use of motor, banana holder for fruit rotation, camera, image processing unit and a display. The device consists of banana holder mechanism along with motor for its rotation as well as the inbuilt camera to capture the surface image of placed banana. Captured images are inputs to an image processing unit. The image is processed and compared with a standard image to display whether the fruit is artificially ripened or not.