Sulfur-fumigated ginger identification via brightness information and voting mechanism

Abstract

Abstract As a food consumed worldwide, ginger is often sulfur-fumigated. Sulfur-fumigated ginger is harmful to health. However, traditional methods to detect sulfur-fumigated ginger are expensive and unpractical for the general public. In this paper, we present an efficient and convenient identification method based on image processing. First, rapid detection kits were employed to mark three levels of sulfur-fumigated gingers, and the RGB images of the gingers of each sulfur-fumigated level are collected. Second, the brightness and texture features were extracted from the images. Three machine learning methods, Support Vector Machine, Back Propagation Neural Network and Random Forest, were applied to establish prediction models. Third, the accuracy of each model was calculated and different weights were assigned for different models. Finally, models with different weights determined whether the ginger was sulfur-fumigated or non-sulfur-fumigated, and then the results were summarized to establish the final identification model. The experimental results show that the proposed method is robust. When the training set occupies 90%, the prediction accuracy is up to 100%. When the training set only occupies 10%, the accuracy remains high at 80%. Meanwhile, the proposed method is more competitive than other methods in terms of accuracy.