Fast and Green Method to Control Frauds of Geographical Origin in Traded Cuttlefish Using a Portable Infrared Reflective Instrument

Abstract

An appropriate seafood origin identification is essential for labelling regulation but also economic and ecological issues. Near infrared (NIRS) reflectance spectroscopy was employed to assess the origins of cuttlefish caught from five fishing FAO areas (Adriatic Sea, northeastern and eastern central Atlantic Oceans, and eastern Indian and western central Pacific Oceans). A total of 727 cuttlefishes of the family Sepiidae (Sepia officinalis and Sepiella inermis) were collected with a portable spectrophotometer (902–1680 nm) in a wholesale fish plant. NIR spectra were treated with standard normal variate, detrending, smoothing, and second derivative before performing chemometric approaches. The random forest feature selection procedure was executed to select the most significative wavelengths. The geographical origin classification models were constructed on the most informative bands, applying support vector machine (SVM) and nearest neighbors algorithms. The SVM showed the best performance of geographical classification through the hold-out validation according to the overall accuracy (0.92), balanced accuracy (from 0.83 to 1.00), sensitivity (from 0.67 to 1.00), and specificity (from 0.88 to 1.00). Thus, being one of the first studies on cuttlefish traceability using NIRS, the results suggest that this represents a rapid, green, and non-destructive method to support on-site, practical inspection to authenticate geographical origin and to contrast fraudulent activities of cuttlefish mislabeled as local.

Rapid analysis technologies with chemometrics for food authenticity field: A review

“… Zhang et al (2022b) distinguished the geographical origins of milk from five Chinese provinces by combining NIR with KNN, showing a discrimination rate of 98.67%. Curro et al (2021) used NIR to analyze the geographical origin of cuttlefish from five FAO (Adriatic Sea, northeastern and eastern central Atlantic Oceans, and eastern Indian and western central Pacific Oceans) fishing regions, with an accuracy reaching 92% after SVM algorithm analysis.…”

Portable NIR spectroscopy: the route to green analytical chemistry

“… Yakes et al (2021) reported the analysis of two fish species and compared the performance of handheld NIR devices. Currò et al (2021) proposed handheld NIR instrument as a fast and green method to check the origin of cuttlefish. Yu et al (2020) assessed by rapid and nondestructive application of handeld NIRs the freshness of tilapia fillets.…”

Cuttlefish Species Authentication: Advancing Label Control through Near-Infrared Spectroscopy as Rapid, Eco-Friendly, and Robust Approach

“…For the unsupervised analysis, Principal Component Analysis (PCA) was employed as a descriptive tool to visualize the data distribution. On the other hand, the supervised approach involved utilizing Support Vector Machine (SVM), as reported in the works of Currò et al [8,14]. Concisely, the SVM model was developed using the 'caret' package, employing both the svmLinear and svmRadial kernels.…”