Welcome to Smart Agriculture 中文

Smart Agriculture

   

Rapid Detection of Tea Polyphenols in Fresh Tea Leaves Using Visible/Shortwave and Longwave Near-Infrared Spectroscopy

XU Jinchai1,2,3, LI Xiaoli4, WENG Haiyong1,2,3, HE Yong4, ZHU Xuesong5, LIU Hongfei6, HUANG Zhenxiong1,2,3(), YE Dapeng1,2,3   

  1. 1. College of Mechanical and Electrical Engineering, Fujian Agriculture and Forestry University, Fuzhou 350002, China
    2. School of Future Technology Haixia Institute of Science and Technology, Fujian Agriculture and Forestry University, Fuzhou 350002, China
    3. Fujian Key Laboratory of Agricultural Information Sensing Technology, Fuzhou 350002, China
    4. College of Biosystems Engineering and Food Science, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou 310058, China
    5. HMEI Mechanery and Engineering Co. , Ltd. , Hangzhou 311121, China
    6. Optosky Co. , Ltd. , Xiamen 361021, China
  • Received:2025-05-30 Online:2025-07-22
  • Foundation items:National Natural Science Foundation of China (General Program)(31771676); Open Fund Project of Fujian Provincial University Key Laboratory of Agricultural Machinery Intelligent Control and Manufacturing Technology (Wuyi University)(AMICM202402)
  • About author:

    XU Jinchai, E-mail:

  • corresponding author:
    HUANG Zhenxiong, E-mail:

Abstract:

[Objective] Tea polyphenols, as a key indicator for evaluating tea quality, possess significant health benefits. Traditional detection methods suffer from poor timeliness, high cost, and destructive sampling, making them difficult to meet the demands of tea cultivar breeding and real-time monitoring of tea quality. Meanwhile, rapid identification of tea cultivars and leaf positions is of great significance for guiding tea production. Therefore, the aim is to develop a non-destructive detection device for quality components of fresh tea leaves based on the combined technology of visible/short-wave near-infrared and long-wave near-infrared spectroscopy, to realize rapid non-destructive detection of tea polyphenol content and rapid identification of tea cultivars and leaf positions. [Methods] A rapid non-destructive detection device for quality components of fresh tea leaves was developed by combining visible/short-wave near-infrared spectroscopy (400-1 050 nm) and long-wave near-infrared spectroscopy (1 051-1 650 nm). The Savitzky-Golay (SG) convolution smoothing method was used for preprocessing the spectral data. The Folin-Ciocalteu method was employed to determine the tea polyphenol content, and abnormal samples were eliminated using the interquartile range (IQR) method. Data-level and feature-level fusion methods were adopted, with the competitive adaptive reweighted sampling (CARS) algorithm used to extract characteristic wavelengths. Prior to modeling, the Kennard-Stone algorithm was applied to partition the dataset into a training set and a prediction set at a ratio of 4:1. Models such as principal component analysis (PCA), partial least squares-discriminant analysis (PLS-DA), least squares support vector machine (LS-SVM), random forest (RF), extreme learning machine (ELM), and 1D convolutional neural network (1D-CNN) were constructed for the identification of 3 cultivars (Huangdan, Tieguanyin, and Benshan) and 4 leaf positions. Additionally, models including partial least squares regression (PLSR), least squares support vector regression (LS-SVR), RF, ELM, and 1D-CNN were established for predicting the tea polyphenol content in fresh tea leaves. [Results and Discussions] The results showed that there were significant differences in tea polyphenol contents among different cultivars and leaf positions (P<0.05). Specifically, the tea polyphenol content of Huangdan was (17.54±1.82%), which was 1.16 times and 1.04 times that of Tieguanyin (15.04±1.22%) and Benshan (16.81±1.24%), respectively. For each tea cultivar, the tea polyphenol content generally showed a decreasing trend from the 1st to the 4th leaf position, with the highest content in the 1st leaf position. Principal component analysis (PCA) revealed that for cultivar identification, the scatter distribution of the principal components of Huangdan, Tieguanyin, and Benshan, as well as their projections in the directions of PC1 and PC2, showed a clear trend of clustering into three groups, indicating a good classification effect, although there was still some overlap among individual samples. For leaf position identification, the scatter distributions of the principal components of the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th leaf positions overlapped with each other, with no obvious clustering among leaf positions. Compared with single-source data, models based on data fusion effectively improved prediction performance. Among them, the PLS-DA model established by combining SG preprocessing with feature-level fusion achieved prediction accuracies of 100% and 87.93% for the identification of 3 tea cultivars and 4 leaf positions, respectively. Furthermore, the 1D-CNN model based on data-level fusion exhibited superior performance in predicting tea polyphenol content, with a coefficient of determination (R 2 P), root mean square error of prediction (RMSEP), and residual predictive deviation (RPD) of 0.802 0, 0.636 8%, and 2.268 4, respectively, which outperformed models using only visible/short-wave near-infrared spectroscopy or long-wave near-infrared spectroscopy. [Conclusions] The developed detection device combining visible/short-wave near-infrared and long-wave near-infrared spectroscopy, mainly composed of spectrometers, Y-type optical fibers, plant probes, polymer lithium batteries, DC uninterruptible power supplies, voltage conversion modules, and aluminum alloy casings, could synchronously collect multi-source spectral data of visible/short-wave near-infrared and long-wave near-infrared from fresh tea leaves. Combined with data fusion methods and machine learning algorithms, it enabled rapid detection of tea polyphenol content and efficient identification of cultivars and leaf positions in fresh tea leaves, providing new insights for the application of multi-source data fusion technology in elite tea cultivar breeding and non-destructive detection of fresh tea leaf quality.

Key words: Fresh tea leaves, tea polyphenols, non-destructive detection, data fusion, one-dimensional convolutional neural network (1D-CNN)

CLC Number: