Object Sensing for Fruit Ripeness Detection Using WiFi Signals

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%.