Near-infrared spectroscopy is feasible to discriminate hazelnut cultivars

The study demonstrated the feasibility of the near infrared (NIR) spectroscopy use for hazelnut-cultivar sorting. Hazelnut spectra were acquired from 600 fruit for each cultivar sample, two diffuse reflectance spectra were acquired from opposite sides of the same hazelnut. Spectral data were transformed into absorbance before the computations. A different variety of spectral pretreatments were applied to extract characteristics for the classification. An iterative Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA) algorithm was used to select a relatively small set of variables to correctly classify samples. The optimal group of features selected for each test was analyzed using Partial Least Squares Discriminant Analysis (PLS-DA). The spectral region most frequently chosen was the 1980-2060 nm range, which corresponds to best differentiation performance for a total minimum error rate lower than 1.00%. This wavelength range is generally associated with stretching and bending of the N-H functional group of amino acids and proteins. The feasibility of using NIR Spectroscopy to distinguish different hazelnut cultivars was demonstrated.