Visual simulation of fruit chilling injury

Chilling injury (CI) is a major postharvest physiological disorder in fruits, causing quality degradation and economic losses during low-temperature storage. While physically-based methods exist for simulating plant deformation, they are computationally intensive and not optimized for capturing the subtle, spatially distributed symptoms of CI, such as browning, pitting, and wrinkling. In this paper, we propose a biologically-informed, texture-based framework for dynamic CI simulation that links biological symptom progression to visual representation. Browning and pitting are modeled using a texture-based de-chilling technique driven by a Logistic model of the chilling injury index (CII), with a histogram-matching-based algorithm ensuring alignment between simulated symptoms and CII values. Wrinkling is simulated by combining kinetic models of water loss with bump maps generated using Worley noise, which approximate the quasi-random yet locally continuous surface deformations caused by epidermal shrinkage. The proposed framework efficiently integrates biologically-driven modeling, dynamic texture evolution, and water-loss-induced surface deformation, producing realistic CI simulations without high-resolution meshes. It applies to multiple fruit types — including tropical climacteric (banana), Solanaceous (tomato), Cucurbit (cucumber), and Citrus (orange, lemon) — offering an effective approach for visualizing CI progression.