Use of Hyperspectral Imaging to Discriminate the Variety and Quality of Rice

This paper investigated the use of hyperspectral imaging (HSI) to discriminate the variety and quality of rice. Hyperspectral images (400–1,000 nm) of paddy rice samples were acquired to extract both spectral and image information. Dimension reduction was carried out on the region of interest (ROI) of the images by principal component analysis (PCA). The first principal components (PCs) explained over 98 % of variances of all spectral bands. Chalkiness degree and shape feature (‘MajorAxisLength’, ‘MinorAxisLength’, length-width ratio, ‘Perimeter’ and ‘Eccentricity’) were further extracted and used for subsequent rice variety discrimination by PCA and back propagation neural network (BPNN). An integration of spectral and image data was used for BPNN classification. The BPNN model based on spectral data (seven optimal wavelengths) achieved better results than PCA based on spectral data (seven optimal wavelengths) in variety discrimination with classification accuracy of 89.18 and 89.91 % for PCA and BPNN model, respectively. The BPNN model based on data fusion achieved the best results (94.45 %), which was superior to the results based on spectral data (89.91 %) or image data (88.09 %) alone. Finally, the resulting classification maps were able to visualize different rice varieties. The results demonstrated that discrimination of rice variety and quality with HSI technology was feasible and could be utilized for quality control purposes and/or for innovative sorting of rice.