Discrimination of Rice with Different Pretreatment Methods by Using a Voltammetric Electronic Tongue

Application of Artificial Intelligence in Food Industry—a Guideline

Artificial intelligence (AI) has embodied the recent technology in the food industry over the past few decades due to the rising of food demands in line with the increasing of the world population. The capability of the said intelligent systems in various tasks such as food quality determination, control tools, classification of food, and prediction purposes has intensified their demand in the food industry. Therefore, this paper reviews those diverse applications in comparing their advantages, limitations, and formulations as a guideline for selecting the most appropriate methods in enhancing future AI- and food industry–related developments. Furthermore, the integration of this system with other devices such as electronic nose, electronic tongue, computer vision system, and near infrared spectroscopy (NIR) is also emphasized, all of which will benefit both the industry players and consumers.

Electronic Tongue Recognition with Feature Specificity Enhancement

As a kind of intelligent instrument, an electronic tongue (E-tongue) realizes liquid analysis with an electrode-sensor array and certain machine learning methods. The large amplitude pulse voltammetry (LAPV) is a regular E-tongue type that prefers to collect a large amount of response data at a high sampling frequency within a short time. Therefore, a fast and effective feature extraction method is necessary for machine learning methods. Considering the fact that massive common-mode components (high correlated signals) in the sensor-array responses would depress the recognition performance of the machine learning models, we have proposed an alternative feature extraction method named feature specificity enhancement (FSE) for feature specificity enhancement and feature dimension reduction. The proposed FSE method highlights the specificity signals by eliminating the common mode signals on paired sensor responses. Meanwhile, the radial basis function is utilized to project the original features into a nonlinear space. Furthermore, we selected the kernel extreme learning machine (KELM) as the recognition part owing to its fast speed and excellent flexibility. Two datasets from LAPV E-tongues have been adopted for the evaluation of the machine-learning models. One is collected by a designed E-tongue for beverage identification and the other one is a public benchmark. For performance comparison, we introduced several machine-learning models consisting of different combinations of feature extraction and recognition methods. The experimental results show that the proposed FSE coupled with KELM demonstrates obvious superiority to other models in accuracy, time consumption and memory cost. Additionally, low parameter sensitivity of the proposed model has been demonstrated as well.

Self-powered gustation electronic skin for mimicking taste buds based on piezoelectric-enzymatic reaction coupling process

A new self-powered wearable gustation electronic skin for mimicking taste buds has been realized based on enzyme-modified/ZnO nanowire arrays on patterned-electrode flexible substrate. The e-skin can actively taste beverages or fruits without any external electric power. Through the piezoelectric-enzymatic reaction coupling effect, the nanowires can harvest the mechanical energy of body movement and output piezoelectric signal. The piezoelectric output is significantly dependent on the concentration of target analyte. The response for detecting 2 × 10^-2 M ascorbic acid (ascorbate acid oxidase@ZnO) is up to 171.747, and the selectivity is high. The response for detecting 50% alcohol (alcohol oxidase@ZnO) is up to 45.867. Our results provide a new research direction for the development of multifunctional e-skin and expand the study scope for self-powered bionic systems.

Mining Feature of Data Fusion in the Classification of Beer Flavor Information Using E-Tongue and E-Nose

Multi-sensor data fusion can provide more comprehensive and more accurate analysis results. However, it also brings some redundant information, which is an important issue with respect to finding a feature-mining method for intuitive and efficient analysis. This paper demonstrates a feature-mining method based on variable accumulation to find the best expression form and variables’ behavior affecting beer flavor. First, e-tongue and e-nose were used to gather the taste and olfactory information of beer, respectively. Second, principal component analysis (PCA), genetic algorithm-partial least squares (GA-PLS), and variable importance of projection (VIP) scores were applied to select feature variables of the original fusion set. Finally, the classification models based on support vector machine (SVM), random forests (RF), and extreme learning machine (ELM) were established to evaluate the efficiency of the feature-mining method. The result shows that the feature-mining method based on variable accumulation obtains the main feature affecting beer flavor information, and the best classification performance for the SVM, RF, and ELM models with 96.67%, 94.44%, and 98.33% prediction accuracy, respectively.