The identification for haploid seeds is an important process in maize haploid breeding. Thanks to the diffuse transmission (DT) technology of near-infrared (NIR) spectroscopy, maize haploid seeds can be selected automatically using NIR spectrum features. However, the NIR spectra of maize seeds contain a large number of redundant features and noise that will degrade the identification performance. We resolved this problem by designing a low dimension and uniform space of seed spectrum features to improve the collected spectra. The zero-phase component analysis (ZCA) method was utilized to uniform the feature space and the partial least squares regression (PLSR) was employed to design the low dimension space. Then, by using the classifier of back propagation neural network (BPNN), a high qualitative identification method was developed for selecting maize haploid seeds. The study results demonstrate that the average accuracy of the proposed method is outstanding (96.16%) with a minor standard deviation (SD) compared with other methods. Therefore, our proposed method is potentially useful for automatically identifying maize haploid seeds.

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Maize haploid breeding technology is able to identify haploid seeds non‐destructively, rapidly and at low cost with the help of Near‐infrared (NIR) spectral analysis. However, due to the hybridization of numerous parents and the low production rate of haploid, the haploid data collection becomes a burden for engineering this technology. Biologically, there are considerable similarities between the progeny of the same female parent and different male parents. Based on this advantage, similar spectral data can be transferred when the NIR technology is employed. A revised method of Transfer adaptive boost (TrAdaBoost) is proposed to improve identifying for the backpropagation neural network (BPNN) classifier. To avoid the negative transfer, a screening thresh is used to select out similar data, and the amount of these data are limited to join current training. The results show that the identification performances are improved significantly when the data amount is small. This method shows a high ability to make the seed identification more convenient for engineering maize haploid breeding.