On-line system based on hyperspectral information to estimate acidity, moisture and peroxides in olive oil samples

Abstract

The analysis of the quality of virgin olive oil involves the determination of a series of properties, such as chemical indexes and organoleptic characteristics. In addition, the determination of these properties in real-time could be useful in order to improve the olive oil extraction process since the process parameters could be regulated with the real-time moisture information.

In this paper, the feasibility of using a non-invasive hyperspectral device, in order to determine on-line three parameters of the olive oil (free acidity, peroxide index and moisture) is studied. In order to study the correlation between these parameters and the information obtained by the hyperspectral sensor (absorption level), three different methods were applied: genetic algorithms (GA), least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (LASSO), and successive projection algorithm (SPA). From the experimental results, reduced values in cross validation were obtained and the optimal wavelengths were pointed out.