IntroductionRapid and accurate detection of food-borne pathogens on mutton is of great significance to ensure the safety of mutton and its products and the health of consumers.ObjectivesThe feasibility of short-wave infrared hyperspectral imaging (SWIR-HSI) in detecting the contamination status and species of Escherichia coli (EC), Staphylococcus aureus (SA) and Salmonella typhimurium (ST) contaminated on mutton was explored.Materials and methodsThe hyperspectral images of uncontaminated and contaminated mutton samples with different concentrations (108, 107, 106, 105, 104, 103 and 102 CFU/mL) of EC, SA and ST were acquired. The one dimensional convolutional neural network (1D-CNN) model was constructed and the influence of structure hyperparameters on the model was explored. The effects of different spectral preprocessing methods on partial least squares-discriminant analysis (PLS-DA), support vector machine (SVM) and 1D-CNN models were discussed. In addition, the feasibility of using the characteristic wavelength to establish simplified models was explored.Results and discussionThe best full band model was the 1D-CNN model with the convolution kernels number of (64, 16) and the activation function of tanh established by the original spectra, and its accuracy of training set, test set and external validation set were 100.00, 92.86 and 97.62%, respectively. The optimal simplified model was genetic algorithm optimization support vector machine (GA-SVM). For discriminating the pathogen species, the accuracies of SVM models established by full band spectra preprocessed by 2D and all 1D-CNN models with the convolution kernel number of (32, 16) and the activation function of tanh were 100.00%. In addition, the accuracies of all simplified models were 100.00% except for the 1D-CNN models. Considering the complexity of features and model calculation, the 1D-CNN models established by original spectra were the optimal models for pathogenic bacteria contamination status and species. The simplified models provide basis for developing multispectral detection instruments.ConclusionThe results proved that SWIR-HSI combined with machine learning and deep learning could accurately detect the foodborne pathogen contamination on mutton, and the performance of deep learning models were better than that of machine learning. This study can promote the application of HSI technology in the detection of foodborne pathogens on meat.