The viability and vigor of crop seeds are crucial indicators for evaluating seed quality, and high-quality seeds can increase agricultural yield. The conventional methods for assessing seed viability are time consuming, destructive, and labor intensive. Therefore, a rapid and nondestructive technique for testing seed viability has great potential benefits for agriculture. In this study, single-kernel Fourier transform near-infrared (FT-NIR) spectroscopy with a wavelength range of 1000–2500 nm was used to distinguish viable and nonviable supersweet corn seeds. Various preprocessing algorithms coupled with partial least squares discriminant analysis (PLS-DA) were implemented to test the performance of classification models. The FT-NIR spectroscopy technique successfully differentiated viable seeds from seeds that were nonviable due to overheating or artificial aging. Correct classification rates for both heat-damaged kernels and artificially aged kernels reached 98.0%. The comprehensive model could also attain an accuracy of 98.7% when combining heat-damaged samples and artificially aged samples into one category. Overall, the FT-NIR technique with multivariate data analysis methods showed great potential capacity in rapidly and nondestructively detecting seed viability in supersweet corn.

Seed purity is a key indicator of crop seed quality. The conventional methods for cultivar identification are time-consuming, expensive, and destructive. Fourier transform near-infrared (FT-NIR) spectroscopy combined with discriminant analyses, was studied as a rapid and nondestructive technique to classify the cultivars of sweet corn seeds. Spectra with a range of 1000–2500 nm collected from 760 seeds of two cultivars were used for the discriminant analyses. Thereafter, 126 feature wavelengths were identified from 1557 wavelengths using a genetic algorithm (GA) to build simplified classification models. Four classification algorithms, namely K-nearest neighbor (KNN), soft independent method of class analogy (SIMCA), partial least-squares discriminant analysis (PLS-DA), and support vector machine discriminant analysis (SVM-DA) were tested on full-range wavelengths and feature wavelengths, respectively. With the full-range wavelengths, all four algorithms achieved a high classification accuracy range from 97.56% to 99.59%, and the SVM-DA worked better than other models. From the feature wavelengths, no significant decline in accuracies was observed in most of the models and a high accuracy of 99.19% was still obtained by the PLS-DA model. This study demonstrated that using the FT-NIR technique with discriminant analyses could be a feasible way to classify sweet corn seed cultivars and the proper classification model could be embedded in seed sorting machinery to select high-purity seeds.

The traditional method used to determine the moisture content of tea leaves is time consuming and destructive. To address this problem, an effective and non-destructive prediction method based on near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) is proposed in this paper. This new method combines discrete wavelet transforms (DWT) with the bootstrap soft shrinkage algorithm (BOSS). To eliminate uninformative or interfering variables, DWT is applied to remove the noise in the spectral data by decomposing the origin spectrum into six layers. BOSS is used to select informative variables by reducing the dimensions of the sub-layers’ reconstruction spectrum. After selecting the effective variables using DWT and BOSS, a prediction model based on partial least squares (PLS) is built. To validate effectiveness and stability of the prediction model, full-spectrum PLS, genetic algorithm PLS (GA-PLS), and interval PLS (iPLS) were compared with the proposed method. The experiment results illustrate that the proposed prediction model outperforms the other classical models considered in this study and shows promise for the prediction of the moisture content in Yinghong No. 9 tea leaves.

Recent studies have indicated that spray-dried porcine plasma (SDPP) is a potential transmission route for African swine fever (ASF). Therefore, it is essential to develop rapid, high-efficiency analytical methods to detect SDPP, aiming to both restrict the abuse of SDPP and block the spread of ASF through feed additive. The feasibility of detecting SDPP using an electronic nose and near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) is explored and validated by a principal component analysis (PCA). Both discrimination experiments and prediction experiments were implemented to compare the detect feature of the two techniques. On this basis, partial least squares discriminant analysis (PLS–DA) under various preprocessing methods was used to develop a qualitative discriminant model for estimating the prediction performance. Before selecting a specific regression model for the quantitative analysis of SDPP, a continuum regression (CR) model was employed to explore and choose the potential most appropriate regression model for these two different types of datasets. The results showed that the optimal regression model adopted partial least squares regression (PLSR) with the Savitzky–Golay first derivative and mean-center preprocessing for the NIRS dataset ( R p 2 = 0.999, RMSEP = 0.1905). Overall, combining the NIRS technique with multivariate data analysis methods shows more possibilities than an electronic nose for rapidly detecting the usage of SDPP in mixed feed samples, which could provide an effective way to control the spread of ASF.

Significant intensification in livestock farming has become prevalent to meet the increasing meat production demand, resulting in a higher density of pigs in relatively small areas in a commercial swine building. The subsequent challenges of maintaining the quality of both routine management and environmental comfort of pigs to minimize the loss of both pigs’ health and welfare can be attained by implementing autonomous monitoring and intelligent management decisions based on precision livestock farming (PLF). A three-layer wireless sensor network (WSN) based on ZigBee technology has been devised to monitor four environmental parameters in real-time, namely: temperature, relative humidity, concentrations of carbon dioxide and ammonia in a commercial gestating sow house. The overall packet loss rate of the WSN system which reported 16,371 records from its 41 indoor slave nodes in a 10-min interval for three consecutive days was 4%. The carbon dioxide sensors had an average outlier rate of 6.5% after a series of preprocessing procedures. The spatial and temporal characteristics showed that the carbon dioxide level exceeded the limit of 2700 mg/m3 twice during both 07:00–08:00 and 14:00–15:00. Besides, the overall NH3 concentration in the swine building was maintained in a relatively low-level range with a maximum of less than 8 mg/m3. In sum, the real-time monitoring and timely intervention of microclimate in this commercial gestating sow house can be achieved by deploying this WSN system, thereby making it possible to provide an intelligent decision on precise management of livestock automatically.

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The maturity of seeds at harvest determines their intrinsic quality characteristics such as longevity and vigor, and these characteristics are dominant factors for seed quality evaluation in the seed industry. However, little information is available on how to identify and further classify the maturation stage of seeds in a way that is nondestructive, precise, rapid, and inexpensive, while also exactly meeting the need for the uniform control of seed performance in the seed industry to improve crop yield. This study demonstrated a nondestructive method for detecting seed maturity by using the single-kernel near-infrared spectroscopy (SK-NIRS) technique. The results showed that five classes of cucumber seeds with different maturation levels can be distinguished successfully. A tree-structured hierarchical classification strategy consisting of one soft independent modeling of class analogy (SIMCA) model and three partial least squares discriminant analysis (PLS-DA) models were proposed ending up with 99.69% of the overall classification accuracy and 0.9961 of Cohen’s kappa in the test set, and its predictive performance was superior to both SIMCA and PLS-DA for direct multiclass classification. SK-NIRS in combination with a multiclass hierarchical classification strategy was proved to be both intuitive and efficient in classifying cucumber seeds according to maturation levels.