High-precision identification of the actual storage periods of edible oil by FT-NIR spectroscopy combined with chemometric methods.

The actual storage period of edible oil is one of the important indicators of edible oil quality. A high-precision identification method based on the near-infrared (NIR) spectroscopy technique for the actual storage period of edible oil is proposed in this study. Firstly, a Fourier transform NIR (FT-NIR) spectrometer was used to collect NIR spectra of edible oil samples in different storage periods, and the obtained spectra were pretreated by standard normal transformation (SNV). Then, the characteristics of the pretreated spectra were analyzed by principal component analysis (PCA), and the spatial distribution of edible oil samples in different storage periods was visually presented using a PCA score plot. Finally, three pattern recognition methods, which were K-nearest neighbor (KNN), random forest (RF), and support vector machine (SVM), were compared to establish a qualitative identification model of edible oil in different storage periods. The results showed that the recognition performance of the SVM model was significantly superior to that of the KNN and RF models, especially in terms of generalization performance, and the SVM model had a recognition rate of 100% when predicting independent samples in the prediction set. It is suggested that FT-NIR spectroscopy combined with appropriate chemometric methods is feasible to realize fast and high-precision identification of actual storage periods of edible oil and provided an effective analysis tool for edible oil storage quality detection.