Quality Degradation of Chinese White Lotus Seeds Caused by Dampening during Processing and Storage: Rapid and Nondestructive Discrimination Using Near-Infrared Spectroscopy

Dampening during processing or storage can largely influence the quality of white lotus seeds (wls). this paper investigated the feasibility of using near-infrared (nir) spectroscopy and chemometrics for rapid and nondestructive discrimination of the dampened wls. regular (n = 167) and dampened (n = 118) wls objects were collected from five main producing areas and nir reflectance spectra (4000-12000 cm-1) were measured for bare kernels. the influence of spectral preprocessing methods,including smoothing,taking second-order derivatives (d2),and standard normal variate (snv),on partial least squares discrimination analysis (plsda) was compared to select the optimal data preprocessing method. a moving-window strategy was combined with plsda (mwplsda) to select the most informative wavelength intervals for classification. based on the selected spectral ranges,the sensitivity,specificity,and accuracy were 0.927,0.950,and 0.937 for snv-mwplsda,respectively. © 2015 lu xu et al.