Journal Issues

Abstract- The export supply chain of Thai durian has so far relied heavily on manual fruit inspection for maturity testing, which has 70 to 80% accuracy when conducted at a packinghouse. Manual inspection is no longer valid in terms of the SPS and NTMs of importing countries, labor shortages during harvest time, and it is no longer competitive with new durian-producing countries such as Vietnam and Malaysia. This paper reviews non-destructive techniques for monitoring fruit maturity, such as NIR/Vis, NIR spectroscopy, HSI, AI-based computer vision, acoustic technology, in-field IoT monitoring, and the cost and performance analysis of the techniques under the SPS and NTMs for durian export. From the literature review, the most promising technique for further development is NIR, with over 94% accuracy, fruit-sorting capacity of 600 to 1,200 pieces per hour, and an initial investment of USD 15,000 to 150,000. In addition, this paper presents step-by-step investment planning for the fruit grading system and discusses future work on establishing a national durian spectral database and conducting a real packing-house test run to make the system ready for deployment of the technology-based fruit grading system for Thai-exported durian.

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