Classification of Floral Origins of Honey by NIR and Chemometrics

Abstract

Near-infrared (NIR) spectroscopy combined with chemometrics methods has been investigated to discriminate type of honey. 147 NIR spectra of six floral origins of honey samples were collected within 4000~10000cm-1 spectral region. Spectral data were compressed using partial least squares (PLS). Back propagation neural networks (BPNN) models were constructed to distinguish the type of honey. Six spectral data pretreatments including first derivative, first derivatives followed by mean centering(MC), second derivatives, Savitzky-Golay smoothing, standard normal variate transformation (SNV) and multiplicative scattering correction (MSC) were compared to establish the optimal models for honey discrimination. Savitzky-Golay smoothing proved more effective than the other data pretreatments. BPNN models were developed within the full spectral region, 5303～6591cm-1 and 7012～10001cm-1, respectively. Results have shown that the highest(100%) classification rate was achieved within 5303～6591cm-1 wave range. Our results indicated that NIR spectroscopy with chemometrics techniques can be applied to classify rapidly honeys of different floral origin.