Efficient, rapid, and non-destructive detection of pesticide residues in fruits and vegetables is essential for food safety. The visible/near infrared (VNIR) and short-wave infrared (SWIR) hyperspectral imaging (HSI) systems were used to detect different types of pesticide residues on the surface of Hami melon. Taking four pesticides commonly used in Hami melon as the object, the effectiveness of single-band spectral range and information fusion in the classification of different pesticides was compared. The results showed that the classification effect of pesticide residues was better by using the spectral range after information fusion. Then, a custom multi-branch one-dimensional convolutional neural network (1D-CNN) model with the attention mechanism was proposed and compared with the traditional machine learning classification model K-nearest neighbor (KNN) algorithm and random forest (RF). The traditional machine learning classification model accuracy of both models was over 80.00%. However, the classification results using the proposed 1D-CNN were more satisfactory. After the full spectrum data was fused, it was input into the 1D-CNN model, and its accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score value were 94.00%, 94.06%, 94.00%, and 0.9396, respectively. This study showed that both VNIR and SWIR hyperspectral imaging combined with a classification model could non-destructively detect different pesticide residues on the surface of Hami melon. The classification result using the SWIR spectrum was better than that using the VNIR spectrum, and the classification result using the information fusion spectrum was better than that using SWIR. This study can provide a valuable reference for the non-destructive detection of pesticide residues on the surface of other large, thick-skinned fruits.

Pesticide residues directly or indirectly threaten the health of humans and animals. We need a rapid and nondestructive method for the safety evaluation of fruits. In this study, the feasibility of visible/near-infrared (Vis/NIR) spectroscopy technology was explored for the discrimination of pesticide residue levels on the Hami melon surface. The one-dimensional convolutional neural network (1D-CNN) model was proposed for spectral data discrimination. We compared the effect of different convolutional architectures on the model performance, including single-depth, symmetric, and asymmetric multiscale convolution. The results showed that the 1D-CNN model could discriminate the presence or absence of pesticide residues with a high accuracy above 99.00%. The multiscale convolution could significantly improve the model accuracy while reducing the modeling time. In particular, the asymmetric convolution had a better comprehensive performance. For two-level discrimination, the accuracy of lambda-cyhalothrin and beta-cypermethrin was 93.68% and 95.79%, respectively. For three-level discrimination, the accuracy of lambda-cyhalothrin and beta-cypermethrin was 86.32% and 89.47%, respectively. For four-level discrimination, the accuracy of lambda-cyhalothrin and beta-cypermethrin was 87.37% and 93.68%, respectively, and the average modeling time was 3.5 s. This finding will encourage more relevant research to use multiscale 1D-CNN as a spectral analysis strategy for the detection of pesticide residues in fruits.

Dried Hami jujube has great commercial and nutritional value. Starch-head and mildewed fruit are defective jujubes that pose a threat to consumer health. A novel method for detecting starch-head and mildewed fruit in dried Hami jujubes with visible/near-infrared spectroscopy was proposed. For this, the diffuse reflectance spectra in the range of 400–1100 nm of dried Hami jujubes were obtained. Borderline synthetic minority oversampling technology (BL-SMOTE) was applied to solve the problem of imbalanced sample distribution, and its effectiveness was demonstrated compared to other methods. Then, the feature variables selected by competitive adaptive reweighted sampling (CARS) were used as the input to establish the support vector machine (SVM) classification model. The parameters of SVM were optimized by the modified reptile search algorithm (MRSA). In MRSA, Tent chaotic mapping and the Gaussian random walk strategy were used to improve the optimization ability of the original reptile search algorithm (RSA). The final results showed that the MRSA-SVM method combined with BL-SMOTE had the best classification performance, and the detection accuracy reached 97.22%. In addition, the recall, precision, F1 and kappa coefficient outperform other models. Furthermore, this study provided a valuable reference for the detection of defective fruit in other fruits.

In the field of safety detection of fruits and vegetables, how to conduct non-destructive detection of pesticide residues is still a pressing problem to be solved. In response to the high cost and destructive nature of existing chemical detection methods, this study explored the potential of identifying different pesticide residues on Hami melon by short-wave infrared (SWIR) (spectral range of 1000–2500 nm) hyperspectral imaging (HSI) technology combined with machine learning. Firstly, the classification effects of classical classification models, namely extreme learning machine (ELM), support vector machine (SVM), and partial least squares discriminant analysis (PLS-DA) on pesticide residues on Hami melon were compared, ELM was selected as the benchmark model for subsequent optimization. Then, the effects of different preprocessing treatments on ELM were compared and analyzed to determine the most suitable spectral preprocessing treatment. The ELM model optimized by Honey Badger Algorithm (HBA) with adaptive t-distribution mutation strategy (tHBA-ELM) was proposed to improve the detection accuracy for the detection of pesticide residues on Hami melon. The primitive HBA algorithm was optimized by using adaptive t-distribution, which improved the structure of the population and increased the convergence speed. Compared the classification results of tHBA-ELM with HBA-ELM and ELM model optimized by genetic algorithm (GA-ELM), the tHBA-ELM model can accurately identify whether there were pesticide residues and different types of pesticides. The accuracy, precision, sensitivity, and F1-score of the test set was 93.50%, 93.73%, 93.50%, and 0.9355, respectively. Metaheuristic optimization algorithms can improve the classification performance of classical machine learning classification models. Among all the models, the performance of tHBA-ELM was satisfactory. The results indicated that SWIR-HSI coupled with tHBA-ELM can be used for the non-destructive detection of pesticide residues on Hami melon, which provided the theoretical basis and technical reference for the detection of pesticide residues in other fruits and vegetables.

The problem of pyrethroid residues has become a topical issue, posing a potential food safety concern. Pyrethroid pesticides are widely used to prevent and combat pests in Hami melon cultivation. Due to its high sensitivity and accuracy, gas chromatography (GC) is used most frequently for detecting pyrethroid pesticide residues. However, GC has a high cost and complex operation. This study proposed a deep-learning approach based on the one-dimensional convolutional neural network (1D-CNN), named Deepspectra network, to detect pesticide residues on the Hami melon based on visible/near-infrared (380–1140 nm) spectroscopy. Three combinations of convolution kernels were compared in the single-scale Deepspectra network. The convolution group of “5 × 1” and “3 × 1” kernels obtained a better overall performance. The multiscale Deepspectra network was compared to three single-scale Deepspectra networks on the preprocessing spectral data and obtained better results. The coefficient of determination (R2) for lambda-cyhalothrin and beta-cypermethrin was 0.758 and 0.835, respectively. The residual predictive deviation (RPD) for lambda-cyhalothrin and beta-cypermethrin was 2.033 and 2.460, respectively. The Deepspectra networks were compared with two conventional regression models: partial least square regression (PLSR) and support vector regression (SVR). The results showed that the multiscale Deepspectra network outperformed the other models. It was found that the multiscale Deepspectra network could be a novel approach for the quantitative estimation of pyrethroid pesticide residues on the Hami melon. These findings can also provide an effective strategy for spectral analysis.