A comparison study of pattern recognition algorithms implemented on a microcontroller for use in an electronic tongue for monitoring drinking waters

A portable electronic tongue has been developed using an array of eighteen thick-film electrodes of different materials forming a multi-electrode array. A microcontroller is used to implement the pattern recognition. The classification of drinking waters is carried out by a Microchip PIC18F4550 micro-controller and is based on neural networks algorithms. These algorithm are initially trained with the multi-electrode array on a Personal Computer (PC) using several samples of waters (still, sparkling and tap) to obtain the optimum architecture of the networks. Once it is trained, the computed data are programmed into the microcontroller, which then gives the water classification directly for new unknown water samples. A comparative study between a Fuzzy ARTMAP, a Multi-Layer Feed-Forward network (MLFF) and a Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA) has been done in order to obtain the best implementation on a microcontroller.