Vis-NIR hyperspectral imaging coupled with independent component analysis for saffron authentication.

ABSTRACT

In the present contribution, visible-near infrared hyperspectral imaging (Vis-NIR-HSI) combined with a novel chemometric approach based on mean-filed independent component analysis (MF-ICA) followed by multivariate classification techniques is proposed for saffron authentication and adulteration detection. First, MF-ICA was used to exploit pure spatial and spectral profiles of the components. Then, principal component analysis (PCA) and hierarchical cluster analysis (HCA) were used to find patterns of authentic samples based on their distribution maps. Then, detection of five common plant-derived adulterants of saffron including safflower, saffron style, calendula, rubia and turmeric were investigated. For this purpose, partial least squares-discriminant analysis (PLS-DA) for supervised classification to find a boundary between authentic and adulterated saffron samples. Classification accuracies for all models for calibration and prediction sets were 100 %. Finally, a mixed dataset was prepared and analyzed using the proposed strategy which again 100 % of accuracies for calibration and prediction sets were obtained. At the end, data driven soft independent modelling of class analogy (dd-SIMCA) was used to evaluate model for class modeling. Sensitivity was 95% for authentic class and specificities for all adulterants were 100%.