LightScatter: A comprehensive software package for non-destructive monitoring of horti-food products by monochromatic imaging-based spatially-resolved light scattering technology

The horticulture and food industry are faced with a range of control measures to supply good quality and safe products to the market. Over the past four decades, a number of techniques have been developed to measure such control criteria in a non-destructive manner. This paper presents a new comprehensive software developed with MATLAB to help scientists and experts to easily and quickly implement light scattering imaging technology, as a non-invasive tool, in the horticulture and food industry. LightScatter is designed as a user friendly software so that interaction with it is done via a coding-free modern graphical user interface (GUI). This software package is equipped with various advanced tools for image acquisition, image pre-processing, feature extraction, and prediction/classification model generation. LightScatter also provides a powerful tool as a standalone application for use of light scattering imaging in the real-time mode. The latter can be activated manually by the user or automatically by an external trigger signal. The software response can be displayed on the monitor screen or transmitted over a serial port for further analysis or for activating electro-mechanical actuators. By the use of this software, light scattering imaging technology can be implemented in both the stationary mode, like a laboratory monitoring tool, and in the dynamic stop and go measuring mode, like sorting/grading machines. An updated LightScatter version is made publicly available and can be obtained upon request by sending an e-mail to the corresponding author.