[Quantitative analysis of goose and duck mixed down using visible/NIR spectroscopy]

Goose down and duck down have very similar appearance but the quality of goose down is better than that of duck down in general. There is a highest allowable limit as specified by the various national standards of feather and down for the percentage of duck feather or down mixed in goose feather or down. Traditional detection method, manual inspection with a high-scale microscope, is labor intensive and not suitable for large-volume samples analysis and on-site rapid testing. In the present paper, visible/near-infrared (NIR) spectroscopy combined with successive projection algorithm (SPA) for characteristic wavelengths selection was used to determinate the content of duck down mixed in goose down. In the range of 450-930 nm, the multiple linear regression (MLR) model established with the 8 characteristic wavelengths selected by SPA achieved good prediction, the correlation coefficient of 0.983, root mean square error of calibration (RMSEC) of 5.44%, and root mean square error of prediction (RMSEP) of 5.75%. Therefore, it is expected to be used for rapid detection of feather and down quality in future.