From simple classification methods to machine learning for the binary discrimination of beers using electronic nose data

Nanotechnology and E-Sensing for Food Chain Quality and Safety

Nowadays, it is well known that sensors have an enormous impact on our life, using streams of data to make life-changing decisions. Every single aspect of our day is monitored via thousands of sensors, and the benefits we can obtain are enormous. With the increasing demand for food quality, food safety has become one of the main focuses of our society. However, fresh foods are subject to spoilage due to the action of microorganisms, enzymes, and oxidation during storage. Nanotechnology can be applied in the food industry to support packaged products and extend their shelf life. Chemical composition and sensory attributes are quality markers which require innovative assessment methods, as existing ones are rather difficult to implement, labour-intensive, and expensive. E-sensing devices, such as vision systems, electronic noses, and electronic tongues, overcome many of these drawbacks. Nanotechnology holds great promise to provide benefits not just within food products but also around food products. In fact, nanotechnology introduces new chances for innovation in the food industry at immense speed. This review describes the food application fields of nanotechnologies; in particular, metal oxide sensors (MOS) will be presented.

Application of Neuromorphic Olfactory Approach for High-Accuracy Classification of Malts

Current developments in artificial olfactory systems, also known as electronic nose (e-nose) systems, have benefited from advanced machine learning techniques that have significantly improved the conditioning and processing of multivariate feature-rich sensor data. These advancements are complemented by the application of bioinspired algorithms and architectures based on findings from neurophysiological studies focusing on the biological olfactory pathway. The application of spiking neural networks (SNNs), and concepts from neuromorphic engineering in general, are one of the key factors that has led to the design and development of efficient bioinspired e-nose systems. However, only a limited number of studies have focused on deploying these models on a natively event-driven hardware platform that exploits the benefits of neuromorphic implementation, such as ultra-low-power consumption and real-time processing, for simplified integration in a portable e-nose system. In this paper, we extend our previously reported neuromorphic encoding and classification approach to a real-world dataset that consists of sensor responses from a commercial e-nose system when exposed to eight different types of malts. We show that the proposed SNN-based classifier was able to deliver 97% accurate classification results at a maximum latency of 0.4 ms per inference with a power consumption of less than 1 mW when deployed on neuromorphic hardware. One of the key advantages of the proposed neuromorphic architecture is that the entire functionality, including pre-processing, event encoding, and classification, can be mapped on the neuromorphic system-on-a-chip (NSoC) to develop power-efficient and highly-accurate real-time e-nose systems.

A Prototype to Detect the Alcohol Content of Beers Based on an Electronic Nose

Due to the emergence of new microbreweries in the Brazilian market, there is a need to construct equipment to quickly and accurately identify the alcohol content in beverages, together with a reduced marketing cost. Towards this purpose, the electronic noses prove to be the most suitable equipment for this situation. In this work, a prototype was developed to detect the concentration of ethanol in a high spectrum of beers presents in the market. It was used cheap and easy-to-acquire 13 gas sensors made with a metal oxide semiconductor (MOS). Samples with 15 predetermined alcohol contents were used for the training and construction of the models. For validation, seven different commercial beverages were used. The correlation (R²) of 0.888 for the MLR (RMSE = 0.45) and the error of 5.47% for the ELM (RMSE = 0.33) demonstrate that the equipment can be an effective tool for detecting the levels of alcohol contained in beverages.

Comparison of sensory and chemical evaluation of lager beer aroma by gas chromatography and gas chromatography/mass spectrometry

BACKGROUND

Although the evaluation of beer is conducted by sensory experts, we cannot neglect the influence of human factors and subjectivity. This problem could be solved by the chemical analysis of the volatile part of beer aroma and, from this, we can build a database for the construction of a model that classifies samples in a comparable manner to sensory assessment.

RESULTS

Twenty-two batches of the same beer brand were assessed by sensory evaluation and described chemically in terms of the contents of alcohols and esters (n = 9), hop essential oil compounds (n = 15) using gas chromatography (GC) and other aroma volatiles (n = 33) as analysed by head space solid-phase microextraction (SPME)-GC/mass spectrometry. The best match of 91% with respect to sample classification on the basis of chemical analyses to sensory scores was achieved with a dataset of results from headspace-SPME and analyses of higher alcohols and esters by regularized discriminant analysis.

CONCLUSION

The results of the present study show that deviations in beer aroma are not a consequence of a permanent repeatable error in brewing process, nor are they influenced by raw materials, but, instead, they are a consequence of alcoholic fermentation. Sensory analysis could be replaced with chemical/statistical analysis on an appropriate data set and for a distinct beer brand. The good results achieved confirm our approach; however, for different beer brands or types, this method should be optimised. © 2017 Society of Chemical Industry.

Performance Comparison of Fuzzy ARTMAP and LDA in Qualitative Classification of Iranian Rosa damascena Essential Oils by an Electronic Nose

Quality control of essential oils is an important topic in industrial processing of medicinal and aromatic plants. In this paper, the performance of Fuzzy Adaptive Resonant Theory Map (ARTMAP) and linear discriminant analysis (LDA) algorithms are compared in the specific task of quality classification of Rosa damascene essential oil samples (one of the most famous and valuable essential oils in the world) using an electronic nose (EN) system based on seven metal oxide semiconductor (MOS) sensors. First, with the aid of a GC-MS analysis, samples of Rosa damascene essential oils were classified into three different categories (low, middle, and high quality, classes C1, C2, and C3, respectively) based on the total percent of the most crucial qualitative compounds. An ad-hoc electronic nose (EN) system was implemented to sense the samples and acquire signals. Forty-nine features were extracted from the EN sensor matrix (seven parameters to describe each sensor curve response). The extracted features were ordered in relevance by the intra/inter variance criterion (Vr), also known as the Fisher discriminant. A leave-one-out cross validation technique was implemented for estimating the classification accuracy reached by both algorithms. Success rates were calculated using 10, 20, 30, and the entire selected features from the response of the sensor array. The results revealed a maximum classification accuracy of 99% when applying the Fuzzy ARTMAP algorithm and 82% for LDA, using the first 10 features in both cases. Further classification results explained that sub-optimal performance is likely to occur when all the response features are applied. It was found that an electronic nose system employing a Fuzzy ARTMAP classifier could become an accurate, easy, and inexpensive alternative tool for qualitative control in the production of Rosa damascene essential oil.

Prediction of banana quality indices from color features using support vector regression

Banana undergoes significant quality indices and color transformations during shelf-life process, which in turn affect important chemical and physical characteristics for the organoleptic quality of banana. A computer vision system was implemented in order to evaluate color of banana in RGB, L*a*b* and HSV color spaces, and changes in color features of banana during shelf-life were employed for the quantitative prediction of quality indices. The radial basis function (RBF) was applied as the kernel function of support vector regression (SVR) and the color features, in different color spaces, were selected as the inputs of the model, being determined total soluble solids, pH, titratable acidity and firmness as the output. Experimental results provided an improvement in predictive accuracy as compared with those obtained by using artificial neural network (ANN).