Odor Discrimination by Similarity Measures of Abstract Odor Factor Maps from Electronic Noses

The aim of this study is to improve the discrimination performance of electronic noses by introducing a new method for measuring the similarity of the signals obtained from the electronic nose. We constructed abstract odor factor maps (AOFMs) as the characteristic maps of odor samples by decomposition of three-way signal data array of an electronic nose. A similarity measure for two-way data was introduced to evaluate the similarities and differences of AOFMs from different samples. The method was assessed by three types of pipe and powder tobacco samples. Comparisons were made with other techniques based on PCA, SIMCA, PARAFAC and PARAFAC2. The results showed that our method had significant advantages in discriminating odor samples with similar flavors or with high VOCs release.