Application of near-infrared hyperspectral imaging to identify a variety of silage maize seeds and common maize seeds

Common maize seeds and silage maize seeds are similar in appearance and are difficult to identify with the naked eye. Four varieties of common maize seeds and four varieties of silage maize seeds were identified by near-infrared hyperspectral imaging (NIR-HSI) combined with chemometrics. The pixel-wise principal component analysis was used to distinguish the differences among different varieties of maize seeds. The object-wise spectra of each single seed sample were extracted to build classification models. Support vector machine (SVM) and radial basis function neural network (RBFNN) classification models were established using two different classification strategies. First, the maize seeds were directly classified into eight varieties with the prediction accuracy of the SVM model and RBFNN model over 86%. Second, the seeds of silage maize and common maize were firstly classified with the classification accuracy over 88%, then the seeds were classified into four varieties, respectively. The classification accuracy of silage maize seeds was over 98%, and the classification accuracy of common maize seeds was over 97%. The results showed that the varieties of common maize seeds and silage maize seeds could be classified by NIR-HSI combined with chemometrics, which provided an effective means to ensure the purity of maize seeds, especially to isolate common seeds and silage seeds.