Monitoring an Odour in the Environment with an Electronic Nose: Requirements for the Signal Processing

Artificial olfaction system (the so-called electronic nose) is a very promising tool to monitor the malodour in the field. Usual odour measurement techniques use human olfaction or analytical techniques. The first category represents the real odour perception but is not applicable to measure in continuous bad odours in the field. The second class of techniques gives the composition of the mixture but not the global information representative of the odour perception. The e-nose has the potentialities to combine “the odour perception” and the “monitoring in the field”. However to be able to reach this goal, the signal processing has to be adapted to work in complex environment. We have more than ten years experiments in the measure of environmental malodours in the field and this paper presents the minimal requirements that we consider essential for artificial olfaction system to become successful for this application.