Online Detection and Classification of Moldy Core Apples by Vis-NIR Transmittance Spectroscopy

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The paper titled" Online detection and classification of moldy core apples by Vis-NIR transmittance spectroscopy' presents an intersting research to the field of Biology.

However the manuscript can be improved to depict the significance of the study more. 

The methodology of the study should be carefully reorganise to show the experimental work done and the conclusions and results interpretations should be avoided at the method. They should be moved to results and discussion sections as appropriate.

References needs careful checking, as some references are not in the approved format of the manuscript. Specially the names of authors follow several styles; i.e some are with initials, some are with full names, sometimes the initials are after the last name and sometimes they are before the last name. These changes should be addressed after careful and thorough revision.

Thank You

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

Dear Editor and Reviewers,

Thank you for your letter and the reviewers’ comments concerning our manuscript entitled “Online detection and classification of moldy core apples by Vis-NIR transmittance spectroscopy”. Those comments are all valuable and very helpful for improving our paper. We have studied comments carefully and corrections which we hope meet with approval. Revised portion are marked in red in the paper. The main corrections in the paper and the responses to the reviewer’s comments are as following:

According to the amendments, the problems pointed out were revised throughout the paper. The content that should not appear in the materials in the paper was adjusted, and appropriately adjusted to the discussion; the reference format was revised again as required.

We appreciate for Editors/Reviewers’ warm work earnestly, and hope that the correction will meet with approval. Once again, thank you very much for your comments and suggestions.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

The authors describe an interesting application to determine moldy cores in apples. This could potentially improve consumer safety to avoid apples containing mycotoxins.

The following revisions are necessary:

Line 18: this is a fragment, please revise

Line 23: define all abbreviations

Line 26: the “respectively” is unclear. Which number is referring to what method?

Line 55 and throughout: do not state first names in in-text references

Line 113: Start sentence with capital letter or check for completeness

Line 140: explain rationale why only 120 samples were sufficient

Line 142-157: this material belongs to introduction and not materials section

Line 428: check grammar: which drived

References: re-check reference style. There should not be authors dropped out with “…”. Note also inconsistent first names of authors abbreviation. Volume and page number ranges are missing in many instances (use Endnote or similar program in the future!)

Author Response

Dear Editor and Reviewers,

Thank you for your letter and the reviewers’ comments concerning our manuscript entitled “Online detection and classification of moldy core apples by Vis-NIR transmittance spectroscopy”. Those comments are all valuable and very helpful for improving our paper. We have studied comments carefully and corrections which we hope meet with approval. Revised portion are marked in red in the paper. The main corrections in the paper and the responses to the reviewer’s comments are as following:

We have corrected the following positions into a more appropriate expression in the revised manuscript (Line 18, Line 26, Line 113, Line 428), and adjusted the text descriptions of Line 142-157 to the appropriate position in the introduction. According to amendments, we have redefined all abbreviations, deleted the first name statement in in-text references and corrected the grammar mistake throughout.

Line 18: Due to the random distribution of the diseased tissue inside diseased apples, the stationary detection couldnot accurately identify the diseased tissue. To solve this problem, the spectra of apples in motion state transmitted forward by the transmission line were acquired.

Line 26: The prediction accuracies of multi-spectra model using SPA for three orientations were 96.7%, 97.5% and 97.5% respectively. 

Line 113: During the actual commercial fruit online detection process, a large number of fruits are automatically fed through the assembly line, which leads to that the orientation of fruits on the detection line is random.

Line 428: The power system of the equipment was driven by a frequency converter to drive a three-phased motor, and the motor drived the sprocket chain to rotate.

Point: Line 140: explain rationale why only 120 samples were sufficient

Regarding this issue, relevant descriptions have been supplemented in the study as follows.

Line 156-167: Taking peach as an example, we collected stationary and motion spectra of peach samples. The Brix value of each sample was measured using a Brix meter. Various preprocessing methods and modeling methods were tried and the final model performance was compared. The above experiments were more to explore the relationship between the visible near-infrared spectrum of fruit and the chemical measurements of internal substances. It provided a certain research basis for the study of apple mold core disease in this study.The study in this paper was based on the above-mentioned large-scale online detection of fruit sugar content. According to previous experimental experience, the spectral data of more than 100 samples could obtain a model with better performance by dividing the training set and the validation set. A sample size of 120 was sufficient for exploring the online detection and sorting of moldy core disease.

We appreciate for Editors/Reviewers’ warm work earnestly, and hope that the correction will meet with approval. Once again, thank you very much for your comments and suggestions.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx