A Method for Detection of Corn Kernel Mildew Based on Co-Clustering Algorithm with Hyperspectral Image Technology

Hyperspectral imaging can simultaneously acquire spectral and spatial information of the samples and is, therefore, widely applied in the non-destructive detection of grain quality. Supervised learning is the mainstream method of hyperspectral imaging for pixel-level detection of mildew in corn kernels, which requires a large number of training samples to establish the prediction or classification models. This paper presents an unsupervised redundant co-clustering algorithm (FCM-SC) based on multi-center fuzzy c-means (FCM) clustering and spectral clustering (SC), which can effectively detect non-uniformly distributed mildew in corn kernels. This algorithm first carries out fuzzy c-means clustering of sample features, extracts redundant cluster centers, merges the cluster centers by spectral clustering, and finally finds the category of corresponding cluster centers for each sample. It effectively solves the problems of the poor ability of the traditional fuzzy c-means clustering algorithm to classify the data with complex structure distribution and the complex calculation of the traditional spectral clustering algorithm. The experimental results demonstrated that the proposed algorithm could describe the complex structure of mildew distribution in corn kernels and exhibits higher stability, better anti-interference ability, generalization ability, and accuracy than the supervised classification model.