Original papers
Discrimination among tea plants either with different invasive severities or different invasive times using MOS electronic nose combined with a new feature extraction method

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compag.2017.11.007Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Electronic nose was employed to detect tea plants with pest damage.

  • Difference in VOCs of tea plants with different treatments was proved using GC-MS.

  • A new feature extraction method was proposed and its strength was proved.

  • The results showed feasibility of electronic nose in pest damage detection.

Abstract

Damage of tea plant causes a lot of loss in tea production, but there is not an appropriate method to detect tea plants with pest damage. In this work, electronic nose (E-nose) and Gas Chromatography-Mass Spectrometer (GC-MS), as an auxiliary technique, were employed to detect tea plants with pest damage in two aspects, including tea plants with different invasive severities and with different invasive times, for giving a comprehensive results. A new feature extraction method based on a piecewise function was proposed and its performance was compared with those of the other three commonly employed models-polynomial functions, exponential functions, and Gaussian functions. Feature selection based on principal component analysis (PCA) and multi-layered perceptron (MLP) were employed for further feature reduction and classification, respectively. The results showed that feature extraction based on piecewise function was the best. The combination of feature extraction based on piecewise function, feature selection based on PCA and MLP was the best method and good enough for the classification in tea plants damage area. The results proved that E-nose was able to detect tea plants either with different invasive severities or different invasive times.

Introduction

Tea with great flavor and high content of beneficial substances (Suzuki et al., 2016), is the most widely consumed beverage aside from water (Vernarelli and Lambert, 2013). Especially in China, tea has been used as a daily beverage and crude medicine for thousands of years (Yen and Chen, 1995). Tea plant (Camellia sinensis) is grown in about 60 countries (Ma et al., 2016) and an important crop in many countries, such as China, Japan, Kenya and India (Dong et al., 2011, Ramya et al., 2013), etc. The tender leaves tea plant are the raw materials of tea (Saravanakumar et al., 2007). The health of tea plant is therefore a crucial factor for producing high yield and high quality of tea. However, many pests attack tea leaves during tea plant growth, causing 5–55% losses in tea production and 0.5 billion–1 billion dollars in economic losses (Hazarika et al., 2009). Tea geometrid (Ectropis obliqua, a chewing insect) is one of the most common pests of tea plant in China and causes severe damage by feeding on tea leaves (Ma et al., 2016, Wang et al., 2016). In this work, the damage caused by Ectropis obliqua was studied. Invasive severity and invasive time are two important parameters for pest damage detection. Hence, in this study, two aspects, including tea plants with different invasive severities and with different invasive times, were discussed for giving a comprehensive information of pest damage.

A lot of researches about the reaction of plant to pests have been published and the results showed that volatile organic compounds (VOCs) emitted by plant change when the plant is attacked by pests (Henderson et al., 2010, Holopainen and Gershenzon, 2010, Snoeren et al., 2007, Yu et al., 2008b). Some researches also showed response changes of tea plant when exposed to multiple stresses (Fu et al., 2015, Mei et al., 2016), and VOCs vary both quantitatively and qualitatively with infestation duration and herbivore density (Cai et al., 2014). Electronic nose (E-nose) (Kiani et al., 2016, Markom et al., 2009), which is a nondestructive technique that mimics the human olfactory system detecting based on volatiles emitted by samples, is therefore possible to detect pest damage (Lampson et al., 2014). Besides, it is an instrument embedded with a chemical sensor array of partial specificity cooperating with appropriate pattern recognition algorithms used for detection of chemicals (Gardner and Bartlett, 1999). Gas Chromatography-Mass Spectrometer (GC-MS), which is a precise detection technique and able to determine the constituents of volatiles and their contents (Ivanova et al., 2013), was also employed and combined with E-nose for giving a more reliable results.

Metal oxide semiconductor (MOS) gas sensors, which have the advantages of cross-sensitivity, broad spectrum response and low-cost, have been widely used in E-nose application (Zhang et al., 2014). The electrical signal of E-nose based on MOS sensors consists of a few hundred measured values, which are too many to be signals as input of analytical methods and exist data redundancy. Feature extraction, as a process of finding a small set of values that largely represented the whole signals, is constantly required (Carmel et al., 2003). Furthermore, feature extraction method is one of the key points of performance improvement of E-nose systems because feature extraction is the first step of the sensor signal processing (Gardner et al., 2005). The feature extraction methods from original response curves, such as maximum value, average value, maximum slope, maximum variance, standard deviation and root mean square (Distante et al., 2002, Yu et al., 2008a), are commonly applied for E-nose because they are visual, intuitive and fast to compute. In particular, maximum value and average value are frequently-used features (Dai et al., 2015).

However, the feature extraction methods from original response curves leave some potential information carried in the signals unutilized. Although these methods have been used for many simple applications successfully, it is widely accepted that more sophisticated features are required when turning to more demanding tasks (Hong et al., 2014). Feature extraction methods based on curve fitting extract features depending on the whole dataset of E-nose and largely overcome this shortcoming. In curve fitting, the critical and complex problem is how to select and envision the specific form of the unknown function (Yan et al., 2015). The most commonly used models (Yan et al., 2015), such as polynomial functions, exponential functions, and Gaussian functions, are all nonlinear, which makes the fitting process complicated and long. A feature extraction method based on a new curve fitting model, a piecewise function, is introduced in this study. This model transforms the nonlinear data into linear first, and then linear equation is employed to fit the linear data and calculate the unknown parameters as features. Hence, this feature extraction method is simple and quick to compute.

In this work, E-nose was employed, and GC-MS was used as an auxiliary technique for proving the potential of E-nose in detecting tea plants either with different invasive severities or different invasive times. A new feature extraction method based on a piecewise function for MOS sensor response was proposed for detecting tea plants either with different invasive severities or different invasive times and its performance was compared with those of feature extraction methods based on the three commonly applied models-polynomial function, exponential function, and Gaussian function. Curve fitting figure and root mean squared error (RMSE) were introduced to evaluate the fitting performance of four curve fitting models, while correct classification rate obtained by multi-layered perceptron (MLP) was calculated for assessing classification performance as well as proving the advantage of E-nose in tea plant detection. The main objectives of this research are: (1) to prove the ability of E-nose in detecting tea plants either with different invasive severities or with different invasive times, (2) to propose a new feature extraction method for E-nose data analysis, (3) to explore if the new proposed method would outperform the feature extraction method based on conventional widely applied models.

Section snippets

Experimental sample and design

This study was carried out using the tea plant cultivar “clone Longjing43”, which was 20–30 cm high and had 10 leaves roughly for each plant, and pest (Ectropis obliqua) at the 3th larval stage was provided by Tea Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences. Each tea plant was cultivated in tea plantation (at field scale) in Hangzhou, China, and watered weekly. They were taken care of carefully making sure that each tea plant was healthy and undamaged. And the chosen tea plants

Results and discussion

GC-MS was employed first to detect tea plants with pest damage and for proving the difference of VOCs emitted by tea plants with either different invasive severities or different invasive times. E-nose was also applied to detect tea plants either with different invasive severities or different invasive times. The E-nose datasets were analyzed by feature extraction, feature selection and classification algorithm. Furthermore, four different curving fitting feature extraction methods, including

Conclusion

In this study, E-nose and GC-MS were employed to detect two aspects of tea plants with pest damage, including tea plants with different invasive severities and with different invasive times. The results of GC-MS proved the difference of VOCs emitted by tea plants with either different invasive severities or different invasive times and the possibility of E-nose in detecting them. For E-nose data analysis, feature extraction methods based on four curve fitting models were compared for choosing

Acknowledgements

The authors acknowledge the financial support of the Chinese National Foundation of Nature and Science through Project 31370555 and 31670654.

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