Nondestructive In Situ Measurement Method for Kernel Moisture Content in Corn Ear.

Moisture content is an important factor in corn breeding and cultivation. A corn breed with low moisture at harvest is beneficial for mechanical operations, reduces drying and storage costs after harvesting and, thus, reduces energy consumption. Nondestructive measurement of kernel moisture in an intact corn ear allows us to select corn varieties with seeds that have high dehydration speeds in the mature period. We designed a sensor using a ring electrode pair for nondestructive measurement of the kernel moisture in a corn ear based on a high-frequency detection circuit. Through experiments using the effective scope of the electrodes' electric field, we confirmed that the moisture in the corn cob has little effect on corn kernel moisture measurement. Before the sensor was applied in practice, we investigated temperature and conductivity effects on the output impedance. Results showed that the temperature was linearly related to the output impedance (both real and imaginary parts) of the measurement electrodes and the detection circuit's output voltage. However, the conductivity has a non-monotonic dependence on the output impedance (both real and imaginary parts) of the measurement electrodes and the output voltage of the high-frequency detection circuit. Therefore, we reduced the effect of conductivity on the measurement results through measurement frequency selection. Corn moisture measurement results showed a quadric regression between corn ear moisture and the imaginary part of the output impedance, and there is also a quadric regression between corn kernel moisture and the high-frequency detection circuit output voltage at 100 MHz. In this study, two corn breeds were measured using our sensor and gave R² values for the quadric regression equation of 0.7853 and 0.8496.

[A Study of the Relationship Among Genetic Distances, NIR Spectra Distances, and NIR-Based Identification Model Performance of the Seeds of Maize Iinbred Lines].

This paper explored the relationship among genetic distances, NIR spectra distances and NIR-based identification model performance of the seeds of maize inbred lines. Using 3 groups (total 15 pairs) of maize inbred lines whose genetic distaches are different as experimental materials, we calculates the genetic distance between these seeds with SSR markers and uses Euclidean distance between distributed center points of maize NIR spectrum in the PCA space as the distances of NIR spectrum. BPR method is used to build identification model of inbred lines and the identification accuracy is used as a measure of model identification performance. The results showed that, the correlation of genetic distance and spectra distancesis 0.9868, and it has a correlation of 0.9110 with the identification accuracy, which is highly correlated. This means near-Infrared spectrum of seedscan reflect genetic relationship of maize inbred lines. The smaller the genetic distance, the smaller the distance of spectrum, the poorer ability of model to identify. In practical application, near infrared spectrum analysis technology has the potential to be used to analyze maize inbred genetic relations, contributing much to genetic breeding, identification of species, purity sorting and so on. What's more, when creating a NIR-based identification model, the impact of the maize inbred lines which have closer genetic relationship should be fully considered.

HPM-based dynamic sparse grid approach for Perona-Malik equation.

The Perona-Malik equation is a famous image edge-preserved denoising model, which is represented as a nonlinear 2-dimension partial differential equation. Based on the homotopy perturbation method (HPM) and the multiscale interpolation theory, a dynamic sparse grid method for Perona-Malik was constructed in this paper. Compared with the traditional multiscale numerical techniques, the proposed method is independent of the basis function. In this method, a dynamic choice scheme of external grid points is proposed to eliminate the artifacts introduced by the partitioning technique. In order to decrease the calculation amount introduced by the change of the external grid points, the Newton interpolation technique is employed instead of the traditional Lagrange interpolation operator, and the condition number of the discretized matrix different equations is taken into account of the choice of the external grid points. Using the new numerical scheme, the time complexity of the sparse grid method for the image denoising is decreased to O(4 (J+2j)) from O(4(3J)), (j ≪ J). The experiment results show that the dynamic choice scheme of the external gird points can eliminate the boundary effect effectively and the efficiency can also be improved greatly comparing with the classical interval wavelets numerical methods.

[Feasibility study on an approach for identifying corn kernel varieties with seed coating agents via near infrared spectroscopy].

It is generally accepted that near infrared reflectance spectroscopy (NIRS) can be used to identify variety authenticity of bare maize seeds. In practical, maize seeds are covered with seed coating agents. Therefore it's of huge significance to investigate the feasibility of identifying coated maize seeds by NIRS. This study employed NIRS to quickly determine the variety of coated maize seeds. Influence of seed coating agent on NIR spectra was discussed. The NIR spectra of coated maize seeds were obtained using an innovative method to avoid the impact of the seed coating agent. Coated seeds were cut open, and the sections were scanned by the spectrometer, so as to acquire the information of the seed itself. Then, support vector machine (SVM), soft independent modeling of class analogy (SIMCA), and biomimetic pattern recognition (BPR) was employed to establish the identification model for four maize varieties, and yield 93%, 95.8%, 98% average correct rate respectively. BPR model showed better performance than SVM and SIMCA models. The robustness of identification model was tested by seeds harvested from four regions and model showed good performance.

[Near infrared spectroscopy analysis method of maize hybrid seed purity discrimination].

Near infrared spectroscopy analysis method of discrimination of maize hybrid seed purity was studied with the sample of Nong Hua 101 (NH101) from different origins and years. Spectral acquisition time lasted for 10 months. Using Fourier transform (FT) near infrared spectroscopy instruments, including 23 days in different seasons (divided into five time periods), a total of 920 near infrared diffuse reflectance spectra of single corn grain of those samples were collected. Moving window average, first derivative and vector normalization were used to pretreat all original spectra, principal component analysis (PCA) and linear discriminant analysis (LDA) were applied to reduce data dimensionality, and the discrimination model was established based on biomimetic pattern recognition (BPR) method. Spectral distortion was calibrated by spectra pretreatment, which makes characteristics spatial distribution range of sample spectra set contract. The relative distance between hybrid and female parent increased by nearly 70-fold, and the discrimination model achieved the identification of hybrid and female parent seeds. Through the choice of representative samples, the model's response capacity to the changes in spectral acquisition time, place and environment, etc. was improved. Besides, the model's response capacity to the changes in time and site of seed production was also improved, and the robustness of the model was enhanced. The average correct acceptance rate (CAR) of the test set reached more than 95% while the average correct rejection rate (CRR) of the test set also reached 85%.

[Study on method of maize hybrid purity identification based on hyperspectral image technology].

The feasibility of employing hyperspectral image technology to identify maize hybrid purity was studied by analyzing the spectral information of maize hyperspectral image. The hyperspectral images of hybrid and female parent of maize variety NH101 in the range of 871-1 699 nm including 308 wavelengths were collected by hyperspectral imaging system. We extracted average spectral information of interested region on maize seed and built identification models of hybrid and female parent of maize variety NH101 based on processed spectral data. The influences of different sample laying modes (seed embryo facing the light source, seed embryo backward light source, and seed put in different locations on sample stage) and experimental environments on the performance of identification models were discussed. Spectral collected under different sample laying modes and experimental environments were used to test the robustness of identification models. The average correct acceptance rates and average correct rejection rates are more than 90%. The feature spectral bands (1 195-1 246 nm) with which the differences between hybrid and female parent are the largest were extracted by a wavelength selection method based on standard deviations, called Qs. The performance of identification models built based on spectral data in feature spectral bands reached the same level of models built based on spectral data in the full range of 925-1 597 nm. The results demonstrated the feasibility of using hyperspectral image technology as an objective and rapid method for the identification of maize hybrid purity.