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.