Philippine E-Journals

DigiMango: A Digital Postharvest Evaluation Tool on Mango Fruit

Louie G. Simbajon | Gia Lorraine C. Mata | Dessa Grace L. Ybañez | Dhally A. Ilisan

 

Abstract:

Mango is one of the most important fruits in the Philippines, with the Carabao variety being the most widely grown dominating the export market. However, the production of Carabao mangoes for export has dropped due to insect pests and diseases, resulting in serious postharvest decay. Anthracnose is the most common of these diseases. DigiMango is a mobile application that identifies the severity of anthracnose in Carabao mangoes during postharvest. The application offers to quantitatively evaluate the development of spot-like lesions on the surface of the mango and produce disease ratings. However, because this application is created for use in laboratory conditions, the mangoes used in the planning and testing were already pre-evaluated and the diseases pre-identified, with the application’s sole purpose providing convenience and objective rating evaluations to the researchers. The application was able to map the lesions by capturing the four sides of the mango using the smartphone’s camera and converted the process using a combination of the following: canny edge detection, morphological transformation, contour approximation, and a thresholding algorithm. After thorough evaluation of the application, the study has proven that the use of the DigiMango application is acceptable and positively correlated with the experts’ rating. Any difference with the hedonic scales used by the researchers is not statistically significant.