Combining e-nose and e-tongue for improved recognition of instant starch noodles seasonings

Seasonings play a key role in determining sensory attributes of instant starch noodles. Controlling and improving the quality of seasoning is becoming important. In this study, five different brands along with fifteen instant starch noodles seasonings (seasoning powder, seasoning mixture sauce and the mixture of powder and sauce) were characterized by electronic nose (e-nose) and electronic tongue (e-tongue). Feature-level fusion for the integration of the signals was introduced to integrate the e-nose and e-tongue signals, aiming at improving the performances of identification and prediction models. Principal component analysis (PCA) explained over 85.00% of the total variance in e-nose data and e-tongue data, discriminated all samples. Multilayer perceptron neural networks analysis (MLPN) modeling demonstrated that the identification rate of the combined data was basically 100%. PCA, cluster analysis (CA), and MLPN proved that the classification results acquired from the combined e-nose and e-tongue data were better than individual e-nose and e-tongue result. This work demonstrated that in combination e-nose and e-tongue provided more comprehensive information about the seasonings compared to each individual e-nose and e-tongue. E-nose and e-tongue technologies hold great potential in the production, quality control, and flavor detection of instant starch noodles seasonings.