Portable System to Estimate Ripeness and Lycopene Content in Fresh Tomatoes Based on Image Processing

Lycopene content is the most important antioxidant in tomatoes by the use in the cancer prevention. It was developed a portable system based in image processing and CIE L* a* b* color analysis, with the capability to sort tomato samples according to six ripeness grades and estimate lycopene content in mg/kg with a correlation coefficient of 0.99 and 0.98 respectively. This study shows that the image processing method is an attractive quantitative method for ripeness grade and lycopene content in tomatoes in a non-invasive assay.