The objectives of this study were to use image analysis and artificial neural network to predict mass transfer kinetics and color changes of osmotically dehydrated kiwifruit slices. Kiwifruits were dehydrated with four different sucrose concentrations, at three temperatures and for the four osmotic durations. A multilayer neural network was developed by using the operation conditions as inputs to estimate water loss, solid gain and ΔE. It was found that ANN with 16 neurons in hidden layer gives the best fitting with the experimental data, which made it possible to predict SG, WL and ΔE with acceptable mean-squared errors (1.005, 2.312 and 2.137, respectively). These results show that ANN could potentially be used to estimate mass transfer kinetics and color changes of dehydrated kiwifruit.

Keywords