Pakistani scientists use AI to determine citrus fruit sweetness
KARACHI: A team of Pakistani scientists has made a significant scientific breakthrough by developing an artificial intelligence (AI)-based visual classification method that accurately assesses the sweetness of native citrus fruits. Led by Dr Ayesha Zeb from the National Centre of Robotics and Automation at the National University of Sciences and Technology (NUST), the team successfully predicted fruit sweetness with over 80 per cent accuracy, without damaging the fruit in the process. To conduct their experiment, the researchers selected 92 citrus fruits, including Blood Red, Mosambi, and Succari varieties, from a farm in the Chakwal district. They utilised a handheld spectrometer to obtain spectra, which are patterns obtained from the bouncing light, from marked regions on the fruits' skin. The team employed near-infrared (NIR) spectroscopy, a technique that enables the analysis of non-visible light spectra, to examine the fruit samples. Of the 92 fruits, 64 were used for cal...