Damage occurs easily and is difficult to find inside fruits and vegetables during transportation or storage, which not only brings losses to fruit and vegetable distributors, but also reduces the satisfaction of consumers. Spatially resolved spectroscopy (SRS) is able to detect the quality attributes of fruits and vegetables at different depths, which is of great significance to the quality classification and defect detection of horticultural products. This paper is aimed at reviewing the applications of spatially resolved spectroscopy for measuring the quality attributes of fruits and vegetables in detail. The principle of light transfer in biological tissues, diffusion approximation theory and methodologies are introduced, and different configuration designs for spatially resolved spectroscopy are compared and analyzed. Besides, spatially resolved spectroscopy applications based on two aspects for assessing the quality of fruits and vegetables are summarized. Finally, the problems encountered in previous studies are discussed, and future development trends are presented. It can be concluded that spatially resolved spectroscopy demonstrates great application potential in the field of fruit and vegetable quality attribute evaluation. However, due to the limitation of equipment configurations and data processing speed, the application of spatially resolved spectroscopy in real-time online detection is still a challenge.
Keywords: fruits and vegetables; optical properties; quality assessment; spatially resolved spectroscopy.