Application of Wavelet Transform in the Prediction of Navel Orange Vitamin C Content by Near-Infrared Spectroscopy

This study was to search for an approach for rapid measurement of orange vitamin C (Vc) content. By using different decomposing levels of Daubechies 3 wavelet transform, the near-infrared spectra signals obtained from intact fruits of 100 navel orange samples were denoised, and the results of the predicted Vc contents for the corresponding samples determined by the reconstructed spectra after denoising were validated by means of PLS-CV (partial least squared-cross validation). It was shown that the prediction effects verified by PLS-CV analysis varied when different wavelet transform decomposing levels were employed. At the wavelet decomposing level 4, the best prediction effect was obtained, with the correlation coefficient R between the prediction and true values being 0.9574 and the expected variance RMSECV being as low as 3.9 mg 100 g−1. Furthermore, the 11 different approaches for the pretreatment of the near-infrared spectrum were compared. It was found that the calibration model established by PLS using spectra pretreated by wavelet transform denoising provided the best prediction for Vc content, exhibiting the highest correlation between the prediction and true values by cross validation. In conclusion, the near infrared spectral model denoised by means of wavelet transform can be used for accurate, rapid, and nondestructive quantitative analysis on navel orange Vc content.