Quality Detection Model for Apricots (Diaoganxing) Based on Spectral Morphological Feature Fusion Across Different Moisture Intervals

Moisture content is one of the key indicators for evaluating the quality of apricots. When moisture levels fluctuate over an excessively wide range, scattering effects and absorption characteristics interfere with each other, making it difficult for a single model to achieve accurate predictions across the entire range. This study investigates precision modeling methods applicable to different moisture intervals based on spectral morphological features. By extracting the spectral morphological features of the water-sensitive regions (peak and valley) and conducting Pearson correlation analysis, the spectral morphological feature parameters with relatively strong correlations were selected, and they were combined with the characteristic bands to construct a segmented model for water content intervals. The results indicate that spectral morphological features of apricots within the 25–40% and 40–55% moisture range exhibit a certain correlation with moisture content. A weak correlation is observed in the 55–70% moisture range. After preliminary fusion modeling of spectral morphological features and characteristic bands for apricots across different moisture ranges, further analysis revealed that moisture content models based on valley morphology features and characteristic bands outperformed those based on peak morphology features and characteristic bands, demonstrating superior representational capability. By establishing a fusion model based on the spectral morphological parameters selected through Pearson’s method and the characteristic bands, the detection accuracy and model stability in the 25–70% moisture content range have been effectively improved. Among all the models covering different moisture content ranges, the model for the 55–70% moisture content range has the best prediction effect. The correlation coefficient of its prediction set reaches 0.8723, and the Ratio of Performance to Interquartile Range (RPIQ) is 2.5220, indicating that this range is the most suitable for establishing a high-precision quantitative moisture content detection model. This research effectively solved the problem of spectral response distortion caused by wide variations in moisture content and improved the prediction accuracy of the moisture content detection model for apricots.