Rapid classification of Chinese quince (Chaenomeles speciosa Nakai) fruit provenance by near-infrared spectroscopy and multivariate calibration.

The quality of Chinese quince fruit is a significant factor for medicinal materials, influencing the quality of the medicine. However, it is difficult to distinguish different types of Chinese quince fruit. The main objective of this work was to use near-infrared (NIR) spectroscopy, which is a rapid and non-destructive analysis method, to classify the varieties of Chinese quince fruits. Raw spectra in the range of 1000 to 2500 nm were combined with linear discriminant analysis (LDA), quadratic discriminant analysis (QDA), and support vector machines (SVMs) for classification. The first three principal component analysis (PCA) scores were used as input variables to build LDA, QDA, and SVM discriminant models. The results indicate that all three of these methods are effective for distinguishing the different types of Chinese quince fruit. The classification accuracies for LDA, QDA, and SVM are 94, 96, and 98 %, respectively. QDA led to high-level classification accuracy of Chinese quince fruit.