Growth Simulation and Discrimination of <i>Botrytis cinerea</i>, <i>Rhizopus stolonifer</i> and <i>Colletotrichum acutatum</i> Using Hyperspectral Reflectance Imaging

<div><p>This research aimed to develop a rapid and nondestructive method to model the growth and discrimination of spoilage fungi, like <i>Botrytis cinerea</i>, <i>Rhizopus stolonifer</i> and <i>Colletotrichum acutatum</i>, based on hyperspectral imaging system (HIS). A hyperspectral imaging system was used to measure the spectral response of fungi inoculated on potato dextrose agar plates and stored at 28°C and 85% RH. The fungi were analyzed every 12 h over two days during growth, and optimal simulation models were built based on HIS parameters. The results showed that the coefficients of determination (R²) of simulation models for testing datasets were 0.7223 to 0.9914, and the sum square error (SSE) and root mean square error (RMSE) were in a range of 2.03–53.40×10⁻⁴ and 0.011–0.756, respectively. The correlation coefficients between the HIS parameters and colony forming units of fungi were high from 0.887 to 0.957. In addition, fungi species was discriminated by partial least squares discrimination analysis (PLSDA), with the classification accuracy of 97.5% for the test dataset at 36 h. The application of this method in real food has been addressed through the analysis of <i>Botrytis cinerea</i>, <i>Rhizopus stolonifer</i> and <i>Colletotrichum acutatum</i> inoculated in peaches, demonstrating that the HIS technique was effective for simulation of fungal infection in real food. This paper supplied a new technique and useful information for further study into modeling the growth of fungi and detecting fruit spoilage caused by fungi based on HIS.</p>