Hyperspectral imaging combined with GA‐SVM for maize variety identification

Abstract The demand for identification of maize varieties has increased dramatically due to the phenomenon of mixed seeds and inferior varieties pretending to be high‐quality varieties continuing to occur. It is urgent to solve the problem of efficient and accurate identification of maize varieties. A hyperspectral image acquisition system was used to acquire images of maize seeds. Regions of interest (ROI) with an embryo size of 10 × 10 pixel were extracted, and the average spectral information in the range of 949.43–1709.49 nm was intercepted for the subsequent study in order to eliminate random noise at both ends. Savitzky–Golay (SG) smoothing algorithm and multiple scattering correction (MSC) were used to pretreat the full‐band spectrum. The feature wavelengths were screened by successive projection algorithms (SPA), competitive adaptive reweighted sampling (CARS) single screening, and two combinations of CARS‐SPA and CARS + SPA, respectively. Support vector machines (SVMs) and models optimized based on genetic algorithm (GA), particle swarm optimization (PSO) were established by using full bands (FB) and feature bands as the model input. The results showed that the MSC‐(CARS‐SPA)‐GA‐SVM model had the best performance with 93.00% of the test set accuracy, 8 feature variables, and a running time of 24.45 s. MSC pretreatment can effectively eliminate the scattering effect of spectral data, and the feature wavelengths extracted by CARS‐SPA can represent all wavelength information. The study proved that hyperspectral imaging combined with GA‐SVM can realize the identification of maize varieties, which provided a theoretical basis for maize variety classification and authenticity identification.