Packaged butter adulteration evaluation based on spatially offset Raman spectroscopy coupled with FastICA

Optical detection technology has been widely used in unpackaged food adulteration detection. However, due to the interference of packaging materials on the internal food optical signal, including signal occlusion, mixing and overlap precluded the accurate detection of internal food quality. In this study, a method of packaged butter adulteration evaluation based on spatially offset Raman spectroscopy (SORS) combined with fast independent component analysis (FastICA) was proposed. The adulterated butter from 0% to 100% w/w margarine at 10% intervals was covered with packaging sheets as test samples. A line-scan Raman hyperspectral imaging system was used to obtain a scattering spectral image of the packaged butter samples. The region of interest of the scattering image is extracted as the input of FastICA model to separate the internal butter signals. The extracted butter Raman features were input into four quantitative analysis models to assess the content of butter adul-teration. The results showed that the ensemble model Extra-tree has the best performance with RMSEp, Rp2, and RPD values of 0.6, 0.93, and 4.73, respectively. Additionally, the applicability of the method was validated with four types of packaging materials. This rapid non-destructive testing method is beneficial to the effective testing method of packaged butter and other products industry.