Classification of washing powder brands using near-infrared spectroscopy combined with chemometric calibrations

•NIR spectroscopy used for classification of brands of washing powder.•Washing powder brands classified using chemometric calibrations.•Models of PLS-DA, BP-NN and LS-SVM were tested in classification.•Results showed successful washing powder brands classification.

In this study, near-infrared (NIR) spectroscopy is applied for rapid and objective classification of 5 different brands of washing powder. Chemometric calibrations including partial least square discriminant analysis (PLS-DA), back propagation neural network (BP-NN) and least square support vector machine (LS-SVM) are investigated and compared to achieve an optimal result. Firstly, principal component analysis (PCA) is conducted to visualize the difference among washing powder samples of different brands and principal components (PCs) are extracted as inputs of BP-NN and LS-SVM models. The number of PCs and parameters of such models are optimized via cross validation. In experimental studies, a total of 225 spectra of washing powder samples (45 samples for each brand) were used to build models and 75 spectra of washing powder samples (15 samples for each brand) were used as the validation set to evaluate the performance of developed models. As for the comparison of the three investigated models, both BP-NN model and LS-SVM model successfully classified all samples in validation set according to their brands. However, the PLS-DA model failed to achieve 100% of classification accuracy. The results obtained in this investigation demonstrate that NIR spectroscopy combined with chemometric calibrations including BP-NN and LS-SVM can be successfully utilized to classify the brands of washing powder.

Graphical abstractNIR spectroscopy and chemometric calibrations including PLS-DA, BP-NN and LS-SVM models were used to classify brands of washing powder. From the scatter plot of PC1 × PC2 × PC3, it can be found that washing powder samples of different brands distributed separately in the three-dimension space. Combined with BP-NN model and LS-SVM model, NIR spectroscopy successfully classified all the washing powder samples according to their brands.Figure optionsDownload full-size imageDownload as PowerPoint slide