A novel multi-odour identification by electronic nose using non-parametric modelling-based feature extraction and time-series classification

Abstract The electronic nose (e-nose) is an olfaction system that consists of an array of chemical sensors and effective machine learning algorithms for the detection of various target odours. Feature extraction and classification methods are of great importance in improving the performance of the e-nose system. In this paper, a novel odour identification method is presented. Firstly, we use the kernel-based system modelling approach to extract odour features. Its solution is a series of finite impulse responses which containing discriminant information of different odours. In addition, a parameter optimisation method based on normalised mean square error and information entropy is proposed to optimise the kernel function. The entropy is effective in preventing the finite impulse responses from overfitting. Multi-odour classification is achieved based on Gaussian mixture density hidden Markov model (GMM-HMM) considering the characteristic of the extracted features. Also, parameter selection for GMM-HMM is realised according to BIC index and cross-validation. Then, we validate the performance of the proposed feature extraction method in resistance to noise and compare it with other existed features. The modelling-based feature reached the highest performance even without applying any filtering or smoothing techniques. Finally, we compare the proposed combination of feature extraction and classification algorithms with other approaches. The proposed method outperformed other approaches reaching 93.56% in sensitivity and 98.71% in specificity. The results demonstrate that the proposed method is applicable in e-nose-based odour identification.