Pixel-level aflatoxin detecting in maize based on feature selection and hyperspectral imaging

Aflatoxin is highly toxic and is easily found in maize, a little aflatoxin can induce liver cancer. In this paper, we used hyperspectral data in the pixel-level to build the aflatoxin classifying model, each of the pixel have 600 hyperspectral bands and labeled ‘clean’ or ‘contaminated’. We use 3 method to extracted feature bands, one method is to select 4 hyperspectral bands from other articles: 390 nm, 440 nm, 540 nm and 710 nm, another method is to use feature extraction PCA to obtain first 5 pcs to shrink the hyperspectral volume, the third method is to use Fscnca, Fscmrmr, Relieff and Fishier algorithm to select top 10 feature bands. After feature band selection or extraction, we put the feature bands into Random Forest (RF) and K-nearest neighbor (KNN) to classify whether a pixel is polluted by aflatoxin. The highest accurate for feature selection is Relieff, it reached the accuracy of 99.38% with RF classifier and 98.77% in KNN classifier. PCA feature extraction with RF classifier also reached a high accuracy 93.83%. And the 600 bands without feature extraction reached the accuracy of 100%. Feature bands selected from other papers could reach an accuracy of 89.51%. The result shows that the feature extraction performs well on its own data set. And if the computing time is not taken into account, we could use full band to classify the aflatoxin due to its high accuracy. [Display omitted] •We used hyperspectral data in pixel level to classify whether a pixel is contaminated or not.•We selected effective bands in other researchers’ paper to explore whether these feature bands is suitable for other aflatoxin contaminated hyperspectral data.•We also use feature selection method to classify the aflatoxin contaminated corns and reached high accuracy as 99.38%.