Abstract
In sweet potato and potato, sensory traits are critical for acceptance by consumers, growers, and traders, hence underpinning the success or failure of a new cultivar. A quick analytical method for the sensory traits could expedite the selection process in breeding programs. In this paper, the relationship between sensory panel and instrumental color plus texture features was evaluated. Results have shown a high correlation between the sensory panel and instrumental color in both sweet potato (up to r = 0.84) and potato (r > 0.78), implying that imaging is a potential alternative to the sensory panel for color scoring. High correlations between sensory panel aroma and flavor with instrumental color were detected (up to r = 0.66), although the validity of these correlations needs to be tested. With instrumental color and texture parameters as predictors, low to moderate accuracy was detected in the machine learning models developed to predict sensory panel traits. Overall, the performance of the eXtreme Gradient Boosting (XGboost) was comparable to the radial-based support vector machine (NL-SVM) algorithm, and these could be used for the initial selection of genotypes for aromas and flavors (r (2) = 0.64-0.72) and texture attributes like moisture or mealiness (r (2) > 50). Among the chemical properties screened in sweet potato, only starch showed a moderate correlation with sensory features like mealiness (r = 0.54) and instrumental color (r = 0.65). From the results, we can conclude that the instrumental scores of color are equivalent to those scored by the sensory panel, and the former could be adopted for quick analysis. Further investigations may be required to understand the association between color and aroma or flavor.