2023 Volume 92 Issue 3 Pages 220-229
Steely grain rate is an important index for grain quality of hulless barley. The steely grain rate is evaluated by the ratio of the mealy and translucent areas in the endosperm on the cross-section of the grain. In this study, focusing on the difference in the transmittance between mealy and translucent endosperms, the non-destructive evaluation of steely grain rate using the brightness, an investigator of the transmittance, was developed, and then the accuracy of the method was validated. Ten sample sets of three cultivars collected in different years and fields with different split applications were prepared as calibration and validation sample sets. The regression line between the steely grain rate of the grain and the brightness adjusted by background had a significantly high coefficient of determination (R2) of 0.8709 (p<0.001) and was used for the prediction of the steely grain rate. The correlation between the measured and predicted steely grain rate of the grain was significant at p<0.0001, and the differences between the predicted steely grain rate and the measured one were less than 10 %. These results suggested that our proposed brightness measuring-based method allows high accuracy prediction of the steely grain rate. However, some sample sets collected in different fields from calibration samples showed significant differences in steely grain rates between measured and predicted values, suggesting that further improvement in accuracy is required.
