Innovative and rapid analysis for rice authenticity using hand-held NIR spectrometry and chemometrics

Rice is the second most important food staple worldwide and the demand will continue to increase with the growth of the world population. As reports grow that frauds is prevalent in many supply chains there is the need for an effective and rapid technique for monitoring the authenticity and quality of rice. This study investigated the novel application of hand-held NIR spectrometry coupled to chemometric for the estimation of rice authenticity and quality in real time. A total of 520 rice samples from different quality grades (high quality, mid quality and low quality) and different countries (Ghana, Thailand, and Vietnam) of origin were used. Among the pre-processing methods used multiplicative scatter correction (MSC) was found to be superior. Principal component analysis (PCA) was used to extract relevant information from the spectral data set and the results showed that rice samples of different categories could be clearly clustered under the first three PCs using the MSC preprocessing method. The performance of K-nearest neighbor (KNN) revealed that for authentication of rice quality grades, the classification rate gave 91.62% and 91.81% in training set and prediction set respectively while identification rate based on different country of origin was 90.84% and 90.64% in both training set and prediction set respectively. For the differentiation of local rice from the imported, KNN and SVM all had 100% in both the training set and prediction set. These gives very strong evidence that hand-held spectrometry coupled with MSC-PCA-KNN could successfully be used to provide rapid and nondestructive classification of rice samples according to different quality grades, geographical origin and imported versus locally produced rice. This technique could enhance the work of quality control inspectors both from industry and regulatory perspectives for the rapid detection of rice integrity and fraud issues.