Motor Oil Classification Using Color Histograms and Pattern Recognition Techniques

Motor oil classification is important for quality control and the identification of oil adulteration. In this work, we propose a simple, rapid, inexpensive and nondestructive approach based on image analysis and pattern recognition techniques for the classification of nine different types of motor oils according to their corresponding color histograms. For this, we applied color histogram in different color spaces such as red green blue (RGB), grayscale, and hue saturation intensity (HSI) in order to extract features that can help with the classification procedure. These color histograms and their combinations were used as input for model development and then were statistically evaluated by using linear discriminant analysis (LDA), quadratic discriminant analysis (QDA), and support vector machine (SVM) techniques. Here, two common solutions for solving a multiclass classification problem were applied: (1) transformation to binary classification problem using a one-against-all (OAA) approach and (2) extension from binary classifiers to a single globally optimized multilabel classification model. In the OAA strategy, LDA, QDA, and SVM reached up to 97% in terms of accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity for both the training and test sets. In extension from binary case, despite good performances by the SVM classification model, QDA and LDA provided better results up to 92% for RGB-grayscale-HSI color histograms and up to 93% for the HSI color map, respectively. In order to reduce the numbers of independent variables for modeling, a principle component analysis algorithm was used. Our results suggest that the proposed method is promising for the identification and classification of different types of motor oils.