Harnessing Multisensory Perception for the Tomato Agrifood Chain

Structural inefficiencies and labor shortages within the global tomato agrifood chain pose significant threats to its economic sustainability. While vision-dominated systems, encompassing structural and spectral dimensions, have pioneered intelligent management, their limitations in environmental robustness and computational overhead necessitate a new approach. Furthermore, dimensional incompleteness remains a challenge in decoding internal states. Multisensory perception, integrating physical (tactile and auditory) and chemical (olfactory and gustatory) modalities, enables the quantitative characterization of tomato physiological states. Based on technological advancements at the leading edge of knowledge, a critical perspective on the mushrooming field of multisensory perception is highlighted. Grounded in the capabilities and bottlenecks of visual perception, the discussion outlines significant progress in multisensory perception, along with its challenges and prospects. Crucially, it delineates the construction pathway of digital fingerprints that couple instrumental sensing signals with human sensory experiences and envisions the landscape of multimodal fusion to address practical challenges. This perspective provides a roadmap for sensorially transparent evaluation systems in the tomato agrifood chain.