IDENTIFICATION OF QUALITY CHARACTERISTICS OF FLUE-CURED TOBACCO BASED ON RAMAN SPECTROSCOPY

A rapid identification method for flue-cured tobacco quality was proposed based on Raman spectroscopy. Considering the critical quality factors of flue-cured tobacco-like oil content, softness, and glossiness, four statistical methods, random forest, K-nearest neighbor, logistic regression, and partial least squares, can effectively improve the accuracy of quality identification. We randomly collected 149 flue-cured tobacco samples from multiple producing areas in China. After Raman spectroscopy analysis, Savitzky-Golay convolution smoothing and multi-scatter correction were done. The functional groups were analyzed to select characteristic peaks as features for discriminant analysis. The results show that the Raman spectroscopic information can distinguish the quality of flue-cured tobacco with an accuracy greater than 95%, whereas the partial least-squares approach delivers an accuracy of 100%. We conclude that Raman spectroscopy can be considered a vital avenue for identifying the quality of flue-cured tobacco.