Measuring Agarwood Formation Ratio Quantitatively by Fluorescence Spectral Imaging Technique.

Agarwood is a kind of important and precious traditional Chinese medicine. With the decreasing of natural agarwood, artificial cultivation has become more and more important in recent years. Quantifying the formation of agarwood is an essential work which could provide information for guiding cultivation and controlling quality. But people only can judge the amount of agarwood qualitatively by experience before. Fluorescence multispectral imaging method is presented to measure the agarwood quantitatively in this paper. A spectral cube from 450 nm to 800 nm was captured under the 365 nm excitation sources. The nonagarwood, agarwood, and rotten wood in the same sample were distinguished based on analyzing the spectral cube. Then the area ratio of agarwood to the whole sample was worked out, which is the quantitative information of agarwood area percentage. To our knowledge, this is the first time that the formation of agarwood was quantified accurately and nondestructively.