Abstract
Cultivar identification plays an important role in ensuring the quality of oat production and the interests of producers. However, the traditional methods for discrimination of oat cultivars are generally destructive, time-consuming and complex. In this study, the feasibility of a rapid and nondestructive determination of cultivars of oat seeds was examined by using multispectral imaging combined with multivariate analysis. The principal component analysis (PCA), linear discrimination analysis (LDA) and support vector machines (SVM) were applied to classify seeds of 16 oat cultivars according to their morphological features, spectral traits or a combination thereof. The results demonstrate that clear differences among cultivars of oat seeds could be easily visualized using the multispectral imaging technique and an excellent discrimination could be achieved by combining data of the morphological and spectral features. The average classification accuracy of the testing sets was 89.69% for LDA, and 92.71% for SVM model. Therefore, the potential of a new method for rapid and nondestructive identification of oat cultivars was provided by multispectral imaging combined with multivariate analysis.