NIR hyperspectral imaging (NIR-HI) and μXRD for determination of the transition between juvenile and mature wood of Pinus sylvestris L.

Abstract

AbstractThe ratio of juvenile wood (jW) to mature wood (mW) is relevant for structural wood applications because of their different properties. Near infrared-hyperspectral imaging (NIR-HI) indicates after calibration, the spatial distribution of jW and mW, and this approach is less time consuming than the established micro X-ray densitometry (μXRD). In the present study, a comparative detection of the jW and mW ofPinus sylvestrisL. was performed by NIR-HI and μXRD and the NIR-HI results were evaluated in combination with three chemometric approaches, namely, the principal component analysis (PCA), partitional k-means unsupervised classification (p-k-mUC) and partial least squares discriminant analysis (PLS-DA) in the range of 900–1700 nm. The best NIR-HI results can be obtained when the transition point of earlywood (EW) and latewood (LW) are assessed separately by PLS-DA. The presented results are useful for an automating data evaluation and simplified data collection.