Discrimination of Different Types Damage of Tomato Seedling by Electronic Nose

College of Bio-systems Engineering and Food Science, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, 310058, PR. China

^a Corresponding author: jwang@zju.edu.cn

Abstract

The profiles of volatile compounds emitted by plants varies in response to different damage. The potential of electronic nose technology to monitor such changes, with the aim of diagnosing plant health was investingted. An electronic nose(E-nose)was used to analyse tomato seedlings that were subjected to differnent types of damage(infection by Early blight disease, infection by Gray mold disease, mechanically damage, and undamaged). Principal component analysis(PCA), linear discrimination analysis(LDA), back-propagation neural network(BPNN), and support vector machine (SVM) network were used to evaluate the E-nose data. The results indicated that the E-nose can successfully discriminate between tomato seedling with different types of damage. The results of PCA and LDA showed that clusters of data were divided into 3 groups (ZP, HP, and CP/MP). Samples from groups CP and MP overlapped partially. Back-propagation neural network (BPNN) and support vector machine (SVM) network were used to evaluate the E-nose data. Good discrimination results were obtained using SVM and BPNN. The results demonstrate that it is plausible to use E-nose technology as a method for monitoring damage in tomato seedling.