Discrimination of wheat gluten quality utilizing terahertz time-domain spectroscopy (THz-TDS).

Journal: Spectrochimica acta. Part A, Molecular and biomolecular spectroscopy
PMID:

Abstract

Wheat is an important food crop in the world, and wheat gluten quality is one of the important standards for judging the use of wheat. In this study, a combination of chemometric and machine learning methods based on THz-TDS were used to identify three different gluten wheats (high gluten, medium gluten, and low gluten). After collecting the time-domain spectral information of the samples, the frequency-domain spectra, refractive index spectra and absorption coefficient spectra of the samples were obtained by calculating the optical parameters. The experimental results showed that there were differences in the refractive indices and absorption coefficients of wheat with different gluten levels. More importantly the differences in refractive index spectra were more significant. The Competitive Adaptive Reweighted Sampling (CARS) method was applied to select characteristic frequencies from the refractive index spectra within the frequency range of 0.1 to 1.5 THz, to establish a discrimination model for wheat gluten strength. We analysed and compared four discriminative models of Support Vector Machines (SVM), Back Propagation Neural Networks (BPNN), Improved Convolutional Neural Networks (Improved CNN) and Sparrow Algorithm Optimised Support Vector Machines (SSA-SVM). The final results indicated that the SSA-SVM model demonstrated the optimal discrimination performance, achieving an accuracy rate of 100% as reflected in the confusion matrix. In summary, this study provides an efficient, accurate, and non-destructive discrimination method for wheat gluten strength, offering a theoretical basis for differentiating wheat with varying gluten strengths in production processes. It holds practical significance for industrial production reference.

Authors

  • Shuyan Peng
    College of Medical Information, Chongqing Medical University, Chongqing 400016, China.
  • Shengkun Wei
    Luzhou Vocational and Technical College, Sichuan, Luzhou 646000, China.
  • Guoyong Zhang
    Sichuan Vocational College of Chemical Industry, Sichuan, Luzhou 646099, China.
  • Xingliang Xiong
    College of Medical Information, Chongqing Medical University, Chongqing 400016, China.
  • Ming Ai
    Department of Psychiatry, The First Affiliated Hospital of Chongqing Medical University, Chongqing, China.
  • Xiuhua Li
    College of Chemistry and Material and College of Physics and Energy Fujian Normal University, Fuzhou, Fujian 350108, China. Electronic address: 626725144@qq.com.
  • Yin Shen
    Hubei Key Laboratory of Agricultural Bioinformatics, College of Informatics, Huazhong Agricultural University, Wuhan, P. R. China.