Multiclass Kernel Classifiers for Quality Estimation of Black Tea Using Electronic Nose

Electronic nose (e-nose) is a machine olfaction system that has shown significant possibilities as an improved alternative of human taster as olfactory perceptions vary from person to person. In contrast, electronic noses also detect smells with their sensors, but in addition describe those using electronic signals. An efficient e-nose system should analyze and recognize these electronic signals accurately. For this it requires a robust pattern classifier that can perform well on unseen data. This research work shows the efficient prediction of black tea quality by means of modern kernel classifiers using the e-nose signatures. As kernel classifiers, this work investigates the potential of state of the art support vector machine (SVM) classifier and very recently developed nonparallel plane proximal classifier (NPPC) and vector-valued regularized kernel function approximation (VVRKFA) technique of multiclass data classification to build taster-specific computational models. Experimental results show that VVRKFA and one-versus-rest (OVR) SVM models offer high accuracies to predict the considerable variation in tea quality.