Identification of Rice Seed Varieties Based on Near-Infrared Hyperspectral Imaging Technology Combined with Deep Learning

[Image: see text] Rice is one of the most important food crops in the world, and rice seed varieties are related to the yield and quality of rice. This study used near-infrared (NIR) hyperspectral technology with conventional machine learning methods (support vector machine (SVM), logistic regression (LR), and random forest (RF)) and deep learning methods (LeNet, GoogLeNet, and residual network (ResNet)) to establish variety identification models for five common types of rice seeds. Among the deep learning methods, the classification accuracies of most models were higher than 95%. This study further used the deep learning methods to establish variety identification models for 10 varieties of rice seeds without considering their types. Among them, the ResNet model had the best classification results. The classification accuracy on the test set was 86.08%. This study used the saliency map method to visualize each convolutional neural network (CNN) model to find the band region that contributed the most to the data. The results showed that the bands with the largest data contribution were mainly concentrated at approximately 1300–1400 nm and secondarily concentrated at approximately 1050–1250 nm. The overall results showed that NIR hyperspectral imaging technology combined with deep learning could effectively distinguish rice seeds of different varieties. This method provided an effective way to identify rice seed varieties in a quick and nondestructive manner.