An effective detection method for wheat mold based on ultra weak luminescence

It is widely known that mold is one of important indices in assessing the quality of stored wheat. First, mold will decrease the quality of wheat kernels; the wheat kernels infected by mold can produce secondary metabolites, such as aflatoxins, ochratoxin A, zearalenone, fumonisins and so on. Second, the mycotoxins metabolized by mycetes are extremely harmful to humans; once the food or feed is made of by those wheat kernels infected by mold, it will cause serious health problems on human beings as well as animals. Therefore, the effective and accurate detection of wheat mold is vitally important to evaluate the storage and subsequent processing quality of wheat kernels. However, traditional methods for detecting wheat mold mainly rely on biochemical methods, which always involve complex and long pretreatment processes, and waste part of wheat samples for each detection. In view of this, this paper proposes a type of eco-friendly and nondestructive wheat mold detection method based on ultra weak luminescence. The specific implementation process is as follows: firstly, ultra weak luminescence signals of the healthy and the moldy wheat subsamples are measured by a photon analyzer; secondly, the approximate entropy and multiscale approximate entropy are introduced as the main classification features separately; finally, the detection model has been established based on the support vector machine in order to classify two types of wheat subsamples. The receiver operating characteristic curve of the newly established detection model shows that the highest classification accuracy rate can reach 93.1%, which illustrates that our proposed detection model is feasible and promising for detecting wheat mold.

Automated summary

Mold is an important indicator of wheat quality, as it decreases the quality of wheat kernels and produces harmful secondary metabolites. Traditional detection methods for wheat mold are complex and wasteful. This paper proposes an eco-friendly and nondestructive detection method based on ultra weak luminescence. By measuring ultra weak luminescence signals and using approximate entropy and multiscale approximate entropy as classification features, a support vector machine detection model is established, achieving a high classification accuracy rate.