In order to reduce the uncertainty of the genetic algorithm (GA) in optimizing the near-infrared spectral calibration model and avoid the loss of spectral information of the unselected variables, a strategy of fusing consensus models is proposed to measure the soluble solids content (SSC) in peaches. A total of 266 peach samples were collected at four arrivals, and their interactance spectra were scanned by an integrated analyzer prototype, and then an internal index of SSC was destructively measured by the standard refractometry method. The near-infrared spectra were pre-processed with mean centering and were selected successively with a genetic algorithm (GA) to construct the consensus model, which was integrated with two member models with optimized weightings. One was the conventional partial least square (PLS) optimized with GA selected variables (PLS_GA), and the other one was the derived PLS developed with residual variables after GA selections (PLS_RV). The performance of PLS_RV models showed some useful spectral information related to peaches’ SSC and someone performed close to the full-spectral-based PLS model. Among these 10 runs, consensus models obtained a lower root mean squared errors of prediction (RMSEP), with an average of 1.106% and standard deviation (SD) of 0.0068, and performed better than that of the optimized PLS_GA models, which achieved a RMSEP of average 1.116% with SD of 0.0097. It can be concluded that the application of fusion strategy can reduce the fluctuation uncertainty of a model optimized by genetic algorithm, fulfill the utilization of the spectral information amount, and realize the rapid detection of the internal quality of the peach.

Egg freshness is of great importance to daily nutrition and food consumption. In this work, visible near-infrared (vis-NIR) spectroscopy combined with the sparsity of interval partial least square regression (iPLS) were carried out to measure the egg’s freshness by semi-transmittance spectral acquisition. A fiber spectrometer with a spectral range of 550-985 nm was embedded in the developed spectral scanner, which was designed with rich light irradiation mode from another two reflective surfaces. The semi-transmittance spectra were collected from the waist of eggs and monitored every two days. Haugh unit (HU) is a key indicator of egg’s freshness, and ranged 56–91 in 14 days after delivery. The profile of spectra was analyzed the relation to the changes of egg’s freshness. A series of iPLS models were constructed on the basis of spectral intervals at different divisions of the spectral region to predict the egg’s HU, and then the least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (Lasso) was used to sparse the number of iPLS member models acting as a role of model selection and fusion regression. By optimization of the number of spectral intervals in the range of 1 to 40, the 26^th fusion model obtained the best performance with the minimum root mean of squared error of prediction (RMSEP) of 5.161, and performed the best among the general PLS model and other intervals-combined PLS models. This study provided a new, rapid, and reliable method for the non-destructive and in-site determination of egg’s freshness.

Spectroscopic technology is widely used in identifying the categories of microplastics (MPs) for its non-destructive, rapid, and without pretreatment characters. Recognition of spectral category is often conducted by matching with spectral reference library, this works well with a known material library, but fails to blindly identify the unknown source of the environmental MPs. In this work, a robust classifier was proposed to differentiate the chemical types of environmental MPs samples, and the recognition rate was higher than 0.97. This robust classifier innovatively proposed an adaptive estimator in the developed k-nearest neighbor (kNN) model as the hard threshold to classify the environmental MPs, and thus the interference of spectral distortions and diversity was effectively eliminated. This method increases the ability to interpret the spectra of realistic environmental MPs samples.

In some cases, near-infrared spectra (NIRS) make the prediction of quantitative models unreliable, and the choice of a suitable number of latent variables (LVs) for partial least square (PLS) is difficult. In this case, a strategy of fusing member models with important information is gradually becoming valued in recent research. In this work, a series of PLS regression models were developed with an increasing number of LVs as member models. Then, the least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (Lasso) was employed as the model’s selection access to sparse uninformative ones among these PLS member models. Deviation weighted fusion (DW-F), partial least squares regression coefficient fusion (PLS-F), and ridge regression coefficient fusion (RR-F) were comparatively used further to fuse the above sparsed member models, respectively. Three spectral datasets, including six attributes in NIR data of corn, apple, and marzipan, respectively, were applied in order to validate the feasibility of this fusion algorithm. Six fusion models of the above attributes performed better than the general optimal PLS model, with a noticeable enhancement of root mean errors squared of prediction (RMSEP) arriving at its highest at 80%. It also reduced more than half of the spectral bands; the DW-F especially showed its excellent fusing capacity and obtained the best performance. Results show that the preferred strategy of DW-F model combined with Lasso selection can make full use of spectral information, and significantly improve the prediction accuracy of fusion models.