Abstract
For the agricultural food production sector, the control and assessment of food quality is an essential issue, which has a direct impact on both human health and the economic value of the product. One of the fundamental properties from which the quality of the food can be derived is the smell of the product. A significant trend in this context is machine olfaction or the automated simulation of the sense of smell using a so-called electronic nose or e-nose. Hereby, many sensors are used to detect compounds, which define the odors and herewith the quality of the product. The proper assessment of the food quality is based on the correct functioning of the adopted sensors. Unfortunately, sensors may fail to provide the correct measures due to, for example, physical aging or environmental factors. To tolerate this problem, various approaches have been applied, often focusing on correcting the input data from the failed sensor. In this study, we adopt an alternative approach and propose machine learning-based failure tolerance that ignores failed sensors. To tolerate for the failed sensor and to keep the overall prediction accuracy acceptable, a Single Plurality Voting System (SPVS) classification approach is used. Hereby, single classifiers are trained by each feature and based on the outcome of these classifiers, and a composed classifier is built. To build our SPVS-based technique, K-Nearest Neighbor (kNN), Decision Tree, and Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA) classifiers are applied as the base classifiers. Our proposed approach has a clear advantage over traditional machine learning models since it can tolerate the sensor failure or other types of failures by ignoring and thus enhance the assessment of food quality. To illustrate our approach, we use the case study of beef cut quality assessment. The experiments showed promising results for beef cut quality prediction in particular, and food quality assessment in general.