African Journal of
Agricultural Research

  • Abbreviation: Afr. J. Agric. Res.
  • Language: English
  • ISSN: 1991-637X
  • DOI: 10.5897/AJAR
  • Start Year: 2006
  • Published Articles: 6894

Full Length Research Paper

Non-destructive measurement of crude fat and crude protein contents of oats from different geographical zones in China using visible and near-infrared spectroscopy

Xuan Wei, Di Wu and Yong He*
College of Biosystems Engineering and Food Science, Zhejiang University, 866 Yuhangtang Road, Hangzhou,  310029, Zhejiang, China.
Email: [email protected]

  •  Accepted: 22 February 2012
  •  Published: 19 March 2012

Abstract

Oats’ geographical origin and internal component contents have great impacts on their flavor, off-flavor, 
emulsifying and binding properties. Geographical origin identification was done by classical Soft 
Independent Modeling of Class Analogy (SIMCA) and least squares support vector machine (LS-SVM), 
respectively. The correct answer rate of the LS-SVM model was 98.3%, better than that of SIMCA (75.0%). 
LS-SVM models were also established for the content determination of crude fat and crude protein of 
oats. Eleven and thirteen wavelength variables were selected by successive projections algorithm for 
crude protein and crude fat analyses, respectively. The correlation coefficients were 0.814 and 0.915,
and the root mean square errors of validation were 0.338 and 0.389 for the crude protein and crude fat
analyses, respectively. Overall Vis-NIRS is a promising technique for the fast and reliable determination 
of geographical origins and crude fat content of oats. The determination of crude protein content needs 
to be further researched. 
Key words: Visible and near-infrared spectroscopy, oats, protein, fat.