Fraud detection in the fishing sector using hyperspectral imaging

Currently, more and more consumers are interested in the quality, safety, and authenticity of food products. The fishing sector is the second food category with the highest risk of fraud and the greatest presence of authentication problems. There are non-destructive, fast and accurate techniques for real-time authentication, with hyperspectral imaging (HSI) standing out among these. In this context, the main aim of this study is to explore the viability of HSI in the visible and near infrared (VIS-NIR) and near infrared (NIR) ranges for the detection of fraud by origin and by non-declaration of the previous freezing process, in anchovies. The spectral pretreatment methods used were standard normal variate method, Savitzky-Golay first derivative and the Savitzky-Golay second derivate, always followed by mean centering. In addition, the impact of using a previous step of smoothing prior to pretreatment was also evaluated. Two classification algorithms: soft independent modeling of class analogy, and partial least squares discriminant analysis (PLS-DA) were used to build the classification model. After analysis, it was found that the modelling results using the VIS-NIR region were always better than those using the NIR region alone, and the best performing model was PLS-DA with a recall of 0.97 for fresh and 0.98 for frozen-thawed anchovies and 0.98 for Cantabrian anchovies and 0.96 for Mediterranean anchovies. One advantage of the model obtained is the ability to classify the anchovies measuring on the skin side of fish without the need for sample preparation. Overall, the results showed that HSI combined with PLS-DA is a favorable solution for rapid, and non-destructive recognition of adulteration regarding freshness and origin in anchovies.