Object Sensing for Fruit Ripeness Detection Using WiFi Signals
This addresses the problem of non-destructive, low-cost fruit ripeness monitoring for consumers or agriculture, but it is incremental as it applies existing wireless sensing techniques to a new application.
The paper tackles fruit ripeness detection by developing FruitSense, a system that uses WiFi signals to sense physiological changes in fruits, achieving over 90% accuracy in experiments with kiwi and avocado across four ripeness levels.
This paper presents FruitSense, a novel fruit ripeness sensing system that leverages wireless signals to enable non-destructive and low-cost detection of fruit ripeness. Such a system can reuse existing WiFi devices in homes without the need for additional sensors. It uses WiFi signals to sense the physiological changes associated with fruit ripening for detecting the ripeness of fruit. FruitSense leverages the larger bandwidth at 5GHz (i.e., over 600MHz) to extract the multipath-independent signal components to characterize the physiological compounds of the fruit. It then measures the similarity between the extracted features and the ones in ripeness profiles for identifying the ripeness level. We evaluate FruitSense in different multipath environments with two types of fruits (i.e, kiwi and avocado) under four levels of ripeness. Experimental results show that FruitSense can detect the ripeness levels of fruits with an accuracy of over 90%.