Development of a Smart Sensor Array for Adulteration Detection in Black Pepper Seeds using Machine Learning

Black pepper is an expensive commodity with a high risk of adulteration. Ground papaya seed is the main adulterant in pepper because it cannot be discriminated visually. There are few destructive methods. Since pepper is costlier, non-destructive method of adulteration is must but it is challenging one. The existing non-destructive method uses costlier equipment, bulky, involve laboratory-based testing, time consuming in the process. To overcome the above issues, this article presents the development of Non-destructive E-nose gas sensor for pepper adulteration detection. This system determines the VOC in a controlled environment. The proposed system utilizes MQ2 and MQ3 gas sensor arrays to identify Volatile Organic Compounds present in pepper seeds to discriminate adulterant and non-adulterant sample. The sensor data are utilized to perform the qualitative analysis to determine the adulteration using a support vector machine learning algorithm. The proposed sensor system with Support Vector Machine learning algorithm outperforms in comparison with existing methods with 100% classification accuracy. Conclusion: The developed gas sensor system is connected to the internet via the IoT application model to show results on the web pages and enables access by the authenticated user from anywhere. Client server model with MQTT protocol is used for developing IoT application.