Identification of wheat kernel varieties based on

hyperspectral imaging technology and grouped

convolutional neural network with feature intervals
Haotian Que 
Jiangnan University
Xin Zhao 
(

xinzhao@jiangnan.edu.cn
)
Jiangnan University
Xiulan Sun 
Jiangnan University
Qibing Zhu 
Jiangnan University
Min Huang 
Jiangnan University

Research Article

Keywords: Hyperspectral imaging, Convolutional neural network, wheat kernel, spectral wavelength
interval selection

Posted Date: August 17th, 2022

DOI: https://doi.org/10.21203/rs.3.rs-1951327/v1

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Abstract
Variety identification of seeds is essential for evaluating seed purity and ensuring crop yields. This study
used hyperspectral imaging to determine 8 high-quality wheat kernel varieties in China combined with a
deep learning network and spectral wavelength interval selection methods. The hyperspectral images
with a spectral range of 400-1000 nm were firstly processed by three kinds of spectral wavelength interval
selection methods including interval continuum removal (iCR), backward interval partial least squares
(BiPLS), and interval random frog (iRF) for exploring optimal wavelength intervals. Then the
convolutional neural network (CNN) classification models in combination with the processed
hyperspectral images were developed. In order to extract effective features, two different structures with
full convolution (FC) and grouped convolution (GC) were used. The performance of the proposed models
was validated with 8000 samples from the 8 varieties of wheat kernels. The results showed that the
combination of feature wavelength and grouping convolution enabled classification models effectively to
obtain better classification accuracy and improve the inference speed of the model. The iCR-GC CNN
model had the highest classification accuracy with a 4.4% increase and the fastest inference speed with
a 44.21% reduction by comparing with the reference CNN classification model.

1. Introduction
Wheat is one of the most important food crops in temperate countries, widely used as livestock feed and
staple food (Tadesse et al., 2019). With the development of crop science and breeding technology, an
increasing number of wheat varieties have flooded the market. At the same time, the purity of wheat
kernels has also attracted great attention from breeders, planters, and consumer (Koistinen and
Hanhineva, 2017). However, wheat kernels of different varieties have an almost consistent visual
appearance, which makes it difficult to distinguish with the naked eye. Traditional methods used to
identify wheat varieties, such as high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) and gas
chromatography-mass spectrometer (GC-MS) (Qiu et al., 2018), usually consume a huge amount of time
and manpower, meanwhile causing damage to the tested samples. A series of recent advances in
machine learning, spectroscopy, and computer graphics have led to a variety of rapid and non-destructive
methods for the identification of crop seed varieties.

Hyperspectral imaging is an emerging technology that can fuse visible/near-infrared (VNIR) spectra into
an image. The hyperspectral image is defined as a data cube with a shape of w×h×d where the w×h is the
width and height of the image that contains the information in spatial dimensions and d is the bands of
the image that contains the information in spectral dimensions. It can be regarded as a spectrum with an
image on each band or an image with a spectrum on each pixel. Due to the above characteristics of the
hyperspectral image, many rapid and nondestructive methods for the identification of crop seed varieties
based on machine learning have been proposed (Ge et al., 2019; Xu et al., 2021). Huang et al. (2016)
reported a 92.19% prediction accuracy in classifying 17 varieties of maize seed using the morphological,
texture, and spectrum features of the hyperspectral image combined with the feature
transformation/reduction by developing a least squares support vector machines model. Yang et al.
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(2015) extracted five morphological features and eight texture features to develop two classification
models of four waxy corn seed varieties. The classification accuracies were 77.4%-98.2%. Wang et al.
(2015) used the chalkiness degree and shape feature of rice and obtained 88.09%-94.45% accuracy in
classifying three rice varieties with a backpropagation neural network classifier. However, all of these
studies are at the core of the traditional machine learning algorithms built on a series of features
extracted from the hyperspectral images. The process of extracting features is complicated, and the
results of the research will depend on the method of extracting features.

Deep learning (DL) is one of the most recent emerging research focuses of data analysis and has been
successfully applied to hyperspectral image processing (Li and He, 2020; Vaddi and Manoharan, 2020).
DL adopts a neuron structure similar to the biological brain to learn the deep features of the data
automatically, which is different from traditional machine learning. This neuron structure can extract
various features of the original data layer by layer, and gradually convert them into some high-level
abstract features for mining the deep information of the data (Zhao and Du, 2016). The convolutional
neural network (CNN) is one of the important networks in deep learning, which has been applied to the
identification of crop seed varieties. Yu et al. (2021) introduced CNN to identify hybrid okra seeds and
indicated the effectiveness of CNN with a 93.79% prediction accuracy in classifying 17 varieties of hybrid
okra seeds where CNN had the highest accuracy by comparison with extreme learning machine (ELM)
and stacked sparse auto-encoder (SSAE). Singh et al. (2021) employed the near-infrared hyperspectral
imaging coupled with the CNN to identify the barley seeds variety and demonstrated that the CNN model
with a 98% prediction accuracy in classifying 35 Indian barley varieties has higher accuracy than the
traditional machine learning. Chatnuntawech et al. (2018) showed better performance of CNN with 11.9%
absolute improvement in the mean classification accuracy compared with the support vector machine
(SVM) for identifying rice seed varieties. These satisfactory results show that this CNN classification
model, which can automatically extract features, is expert in processing hyperspectral images and
capable of classifying crop seeds. Unlike the traditional method, the high-dimensional hyperspectral data
cube can be processed by CNN directly without feature extraction.

Although the high-dimensional hyperspectral data cube is beneficial to the application of remote sensing
and crop seed recognition, there are still some problems. The hyperspectral images are usually highly
redundant in the spectral dimensions (Zhang et al., 2012), which will lead to an increase in computational
complexity, storage space, and communication bandwidth (Sui et al., 2014). This redundancy will not
only lengthen the training and inference time of CNN which would have taken plenty of time, but also
cause the CNN classification model to fail to focus on the most valuable information of hyperspectral
images the first time. Thus, prior knowledge is needed for constraining the hyperspectral images in the
spectral dimensions. In this study, the feature wavelength interval selection is introduced as prior
knowledge of spectroscopy to constrain the spectral dimension of the hyperspectral images. The interval
continuum removal (iCR) (Itoh and Iwasaki, 2013), backward interval partial least squares (BiPLS)
(Huang et al., 2012), and interval random frog (iRF) (Yun et al., 2013) are used to extract the feature
wavelength interval. The different wavelength intervals represent the characteristics of different
components in wheat kernels. When constructing the CNN model, a grouped convolution (GC) in the first
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layer can independently extract the features of different information intervals, it is better to effectively
characterize the hyperspectral images. Then the features are merged in the next convolutional layer and
full connect layer. In order to verify the general applicability of the proposed method, experiments are
conducted using eight varieties of wheat seed with 1000 samples from each variety, and the modeling
performance between the proposed CNN and the traditional CNN was compared. The specific objectives
of this study are to: (1) propose a hybrid approach combined wavelength intervals and grouped
convolution for effectively extracting hyperspectral features; (2) develop the appropriate lightweight CNN
of hyperspectral images for wheat kernels classification;

The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. Section 2 presents the experimental data collection,
the hyperspectral imaging system, and image preprocessing. Section 3 describes the wavelength interval
selection method briefly, then introduces the proposed CNN models. Section 4 discusses the results and
performance analysis. Finally, Section 5 summarizes the conclusions.

2. Materials And Methods

2.1 Samples Collection and Preparation
Eight varieties of wheat kernels harvested in 2020 were collected from SINOCHEM AGRICULTURE
HOLDINGS. The 1000 unbroken wheat kernels were collectively chosen from samples constituting each
variety, thus the total number of wheat kernels included in the study was 8000. In order to minimize the
interference from the external environment, each variety of wheat kernels was placed in sealed plastic
bags and stored in a dark and dry environment (sealed jars with desiccant) at room temperature (20–
25°C). The wheat variety, place of production, and genetic relationship are listed in Table 1, where the
genetic relationship is worthy of hybrid male and female parents of this type of wheat.

Table 1
Information on Wheat Varieties
wheat variety place of production genetic relationship

bainong4199 Henan bainong gaoguang3709F2/bainongAK58

jimai44 Shandong ji954072/jinan17

zhoumai33 Henan zhenmai366/bainongAK58

weilong169 Henan shanmai94/xinong822

Shiluan02-1 Hebei 9411/9430

bainongAK58 Henan zhoumai11/wenmai6/zhenzhou8960

xinmai26 Henan 9408E1/jinan17

jimai22 Shangdong 935024/935106

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2.2 The Hyperspectral Imaging System
The hyperspectral images of wheat kernels were acquired by using a push broom (line scan)
hyperspectral imaging system, and the schematic diagram of the system is shown in Fig. 1. The system
consisted of an image acquisition module, halogen light source, and linear displacement platform.

The image acquisition module was mainly composed of a hyperspectral image spectrograph (1003A-
10140 HyperspcTM VNIR C-Series, Headwall Photonics Inc. USA), CCD camera (pixelfly qe IC * 285AL,
Cooke, USA), and lens (10004A-21226 Lens, F/1.4 FL23 mm, Standard Barrel, C -Mount., USA). The
parallel light was irradiated on the linear displacement platform with samples by the light source through
the collimator lens linked by the optical fiber. The linear displacement platform was driven with the aid of
a stepper motor was used for a constant scanning speed through Hyperspec-M Rev A.2.1.6 software. All
system components except the halogen light source are placed in a dark box to prevent ambient light
from affecting the system. In this study, the power of the light source, the moving speed of the conveyer
belt, the exposure time of the camera, and the distance from the lens to the plate were set as 60 w, 10
mm/s, 250 ms, and 28 cm, respectively. The band interval during spectrum sampling is 6.38nm, a total of
94 bands with the spectral range from 400 to 1,000 nm, the scan step is 100µm, the total scan length is
100mm (with 1,000 scanning lines for each hyperspectral image), and the scan width is 139.2mm. A
hyperspectral image data cube of each batch of wheat kernels with the shape of 1000×1392×94 was
obtained ultimately.

The kernels were placed on a counting board with small grooves for hyperspectral image acquisition. The
counting board was made of special materials with a very low reflectance in the visible/near-infrared
range. A total of 8,000 wheat samples were collected from 8 varieties (1000 samples for each variety).

2.3 Hyperspectral Image Preprocessing

Due to the uneven distribution of the light source in each band, the dark current in the camera, and the
influence of the surrounding environment, the collected hyperspectral images will contain a certain
amount of noise. To the extent possible to reduce these noises, black and white calibration was
performed after every 5 times of hyperspectral image data collection. The calibration formula is as
shown in Eq. (1).

I − IBlack
Icablibration =
IWhite − IBlack

Where Icalibration is the hyperspectral image after calibration, is the raw hyperspectral image, IBlack is
the dark reference obtained by covering the lens with an opaque cap, IWhite is the white reference
obtained by scanning a standard whiteboard.

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Firstly, the original hyperspectral image was converted to tif format using ENVI5.1 (ITT Visual Information
Solutions, Boulder, UT). Figure 2 shows the procedures of spectral data extraction. The pseudo-RGB
image composed of the reflectance of HIS bands 1 (402.53 nm), 17 (505.60 nm), and 35 (621.54 nm)
was converted to the YCbCr color space. The CB channel component of YCbCr images which contained
the density offset component of blue in the pseudo-RGB image was taken as a grayscale image. The
Otsu binarization method (Otsu, 1979) was adopted to binarize the grayscale image to divide it into the
wheat region and another region preliminarily. Morphological filtering was performed on the binary image
to obtain the mask of the wheat image. Finally, use the mask to extract the region of interest (ROI) of the
image i.e. the wheat region. 0 was added around each wheat image to ensure that the size of each wheat
image was 60×80×94.

3. Data Analysis Methods

In this study, iCR, BiPLS, and iRF were introduced as prior knowledge of spectroscopy to constrain the
spectral dimension of hyperspectral images. The proposed CNN classification models with different
structures are used to classify wheat.

3.1 Spectral wavelength interval selection methods

3.1.1 Interval continuum removal
Continuum removal may be defined as a spectral processing method that is used to enhance and
standardize the specific absorption characteristics of the biochemical components of the sample
spectrum (Malenovský et al., 2013). In the literature (Huang et al., 2004), the continuum tends to be used
to refer to a series of straight-line segments fitted over the top of a spectrum that connect local spectral
maxima and represents the “background absorption” onto which other absorption features are
superimposed. Continuum removal is done by dividing the reflectance of each point in the absorption
feature by the reflectance of the continuum at the corresponding wavelength. The raw profile and
continuum profile are shown in Fig. 3. Different varieties of wheat all have absorption valleys at the same
wavelengths, but the extreme points of these absorption valleys are not completely consistent. Only using
the combination of a single waveband as the input of the simplified model may lead to the inability to
accurately represent these absorption valleys. The characteristic absorption valley and its nearby
wavelengths will be selected as the interval that would be used to develop simplified classification
models. In this study, the interval region is set to 10.

3.1.2 Backward interval partial least squares

BiPLS (Leardi and Nørgaard, 2004) can be loosely described as a fast automatic way to remove non-
relevant spectral regions prior which is widely used for spectral wavelength interval selection. BiPLS
divides the spectrum into multiple intervals and finds the optimal interval combination by backward
elimination whose removal results in the lowest root-mean-square error of cross-validation of PLS. The

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maximum number of PLS components is 4 and the data sample is split into 5 groups for cross-
validation. The number of sub-intervals depends on the characteristic curve of wheat kernels.

3.1.3 Interval random frog

iRF (Yun et al., 2013) is a PLS-based heuristic group evolution algorithm for spectral wavelength interval
selection. A fixed-width moving window is introduced to divide the spectra into sub-intervals. Random
frog coupled with PLS is applied to select these intervals. There are six parameters to be initialized of iRF.
The interval width w depends on the chemical bandwidth. According to experience, the number of
iterations N is set to 1000. In order to make the initial set contain more intervals the number of variables,
Q is set to 20. According to the reference, the remaining three parameters θ, ω and η have no significant
effect on the results are set to 0.3, 3, and 0.1. And the maximum number of PLS components is 10.

3.2 Convolutional neural network

CNN is a deep learning algorithm used widely which can extract abstract features from the sample data
automatically. The architecture of CNN is mainly constituted by convolutional layers, batch normalization
layers, activation layers, pooling layers, flattening layers, and full connection layers. The convolutional
layer with a series of local receptive fields convolution kernels is generally employed as an excellent
feature extractor (Weng et al., 2021). The activation layer with a non-linear activation function is typically
applied after the convolutional layer to provide nonlinearity for the network. The pooling layer is a
nonlinear downsampling method used to reduce the spatial size or dimension of the output feature map
generated by the convolutional layer. The output feature map generated by the convolutional layer is
flattened into 1-dimensional data through the flattening layer and input to the full connection layer for
classification. In the reference (Santurkar et al., 2018), the author pointed out that the batch normalization
layer may make the optimization landscape significantly smoother which will bring prevention of
exploding or vanishing gradients, robustness to different settings of hyperparameters such as learning
rate and initialization scheme, and keeping most of the activations away from saturation regions of non-
linearities. In this study, two CNN classification models with different structures are used for wheat
classification and shown in Fig. 4–5. Three convolutional modules were applied in the first CNN
classification model in Fig. 4. Each convolutional module includes a convolutional layer, a batch
normalization (BN) layer, a ReLU activation layer, and a maxpooling layer. The number of convolutional
filters for the first convolution layer is set to 160 with a kernel size of 3×3, a stride of 1, and a padding
mode of ‘same’. The second and third convolution layer both have 32 convolutional filters with a kernel
size of 3×3, a stride of 1, and a padding mode of ‘same’. HSI of the sample is extracted into a feature map
through these convolution models and input to the fully connected layer to achieve the classification
effect.

In order to extract the spectral features of different intervals better, a CNN structure combining group
convolution is introduced. The second CNN classification model proposed in this article, as shown in
Fig. 5, has the same structures as the first one which is shown in Fig. 4 except for the first convolutional
layer. The total number of convolutional filters for the first convolution layer is set to 160 which is the

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same as the first CNN classification model proposed in this article. After the spectral wavelength interval
selection, the convolution filters in the first convolution layer are divided into multiple groups with the
same number of intervals. Then the output feature maps generated by these convolution filter groups will
be spliced into one feature map in the depth dimension by the depth connection layer. Since the spectral
information contained in different intervals is generally of different substances, this grouped convolution
structure enables the network to extract the information of different substances independently in the first
convolutional layer and then merge them in the second and third convolutional layers. This can
significantly improve the accuracy of the classification and reduce the network's inference time and
parameters.

To improve the credibility of model evaluation, k-fold cross-validation was used to evaluate the CNN
classification model. The specific operation process shows as follows: firstly, all samples are randomly
and equally divided into k subsets. Take one of the subsets as the validation set during each training, and
the remaining subsets as the training set. The cross-validation will be repeated k times to ensure each
subset has been verified once. The average performance of k times will be accepted as the result. By
employing k-fold cross-validation, more observations can be obtained to achieve a reliable accuracy
estimate and the dependency among accuracy estimates can also be reduced (Wong and Yeh, 2019). In
this study, 10-fold cross-validation was used to evaluate the CNN classification model.

4. Results And Discussion

4.1 Spectral wavelength interval selection results
The raw spectral of the eight types of wheat shown in Fig. 6 (a) is relatively smooth and lacks obvious
absorption and reflection characteristics which will lead to the difficulty of directly analyzing whether
there are absorption and reflection characteristics in the spectral curve. The spectrum processed by the
continuum removal, with obvious absorption characteristics, are similar spectral trends with differences
in the magnitude throughout these spectral regions. The primary structural composition and molecules
were revealed from the spectral data enhanced by continuum removal. Specifically, the absorption peaks
near 421 nm and 486 nm are related to the protein content of wheat kernels (Huang et al., 2016). The
absorption peak is identified near 627 nm, and it is mainly related to the absorption of oil and starch in
the wheat kernels (Bao et al., 2019). The absorption peak near 911 nm is related to the water content of
wheat kernels (Bruning et al., 2019) and the absorption peak near 982 nm is related to the interaction
between protein and the O-H bond in water (Singh et al., 2010).

It can be seen from Fig. 6 that the extreme point shift of the same absorption valley of different varieties
of wheat kernels generally does not exceed 30nm. In order to ensure as much as possible that each
interval selected by BiPLS contains the absorption bands of the same substance in different varieties of
wheat, the spectrum is divided into 19 intervals in this study. The width of the absorption valley, that is,
the chemical bandwidth of wheat on VNIR is about 60 nm, so the interval width w is set to 10. In this
study, iCR, BiPLS, and iRF were introduced to identify characteristic wavelengths that would be employed
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to develop simplified CNN classification models. The results of the spectral wavelength interval selection
procedure are visualized in Fig. 7. The continuum method found that the important bands lie in the range
of 402–460 nm, 466–524 nm, 608–666 nm, 879–937 nm, and 943–1000 nm. The BiPLS method
selected a range of 402–438 nm, 466–492 nm, 499–534 nm, 531–557 nm, 627–653 nm, 692–718 nm,
724–750 nm, 885–911 nm, 917–943 nm and 950–975 nm. The iRF methods produced high importance
scores in the range of 408–466 nm, 479–537 nm, 576–634 nm, 776–834 nm, and 930–988 nm. The
intervals found by the above methods all contain parts or all of the absorption properties mentioned in
the previous section. Therefore, as a simplification of full wavelengths, these wavelength intervals
contained important information about different physical and chemical characteristics and could be
combined with CNN classifiers to perform further discriminant analysis.

4.2 Classification results and analysis

The effects of feature selectors based on iCR, BiPLS, and iRF were compared. The classification
accuracies with different feature extraction algorithms are summarized in Table 2. The following
observations can be found: (1) In structure 1, the overall performances (accuracy rate and inference time)
of the selected wavelength intervals are better than that of the full wavelength which means that the
introduced prior knowledge can well exclude wavelength with low relevance to classification to maintain
a high accuracy rate and reduce inference time. Especially in inference time, after introducing prior
knowledge, the average inference time is significantly reduced by 47.56%. (2) After adopting structure 2
there is an average of 3.75% improvement in accuracy compared to structure 1, and an average of 3.87%
improvement in accuracy compared with the full wavelength model. At the same time, the reasoning time
is further reduced by 4.81% based on the introduction of prior knowledge. This indicates that by
introducing the group structure to deal with the selected wavelength intervals, the model could focus on
the absorption peaks of physical and chemical characteristics contained in each interval at the first time
which leads to an increase in classification accuracy. Grouped convolution can reduce the parameter in
the layer employing this structure to 1/n of the original where n is the number of groups.

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 Table 2
The classification accuracies and Inference time achieved by different feature selectors and classifiers.
Convolutional Variable Interval selection Acc.[b] Inference time[b]
structure number method (s)

Structure 1[a] 94 - 90.96% 0.380

±1.50%

50 iCR 91.83% 0.172

±0.86%

50 BiPLS 90.46% 0.199

±0.68%

50 iRF 90.95% 0.170

±0.93%

Structure 2[a] 50 iCR 95.36% 0.168

±0.85%

50 BiPLS 94.02% 0.178

±1.24%

50 iRF 95.11% 0.169

±0.80%

[a]
Structure 1 in convolutional structure represents the structure shown in Fig. 4, and structure 2 is
shown in Fig. 5.

[b]
Acc represents the classification accuracy of the 10-fold cross-validation described in section 2.5.5.
Inference time(s) is the time that takes for the classification model to judge the varieties of 100
samples.

The relationship between iteration and training accuracy were shown in Fig. 8. The classification model
that adopts the grouped convolution structure has a faster convergence speed which converges to 100%
classification accuracy around 6000 iterations. The convergence speed of the classification model
without grouped convolution structure is slower, and it converges to 100% classification accuracy around
10,000 iterations. The descent of the curve around 5500 iterations and 8250 iterations is caused by the
stochastic gradient descent algorithm jumping out of the local optimum.

The overall results demonstrated that it was feasible to combine CNN especially group CNN and spectral
prior knowledge for varieties identification of wheat kernels based on hyperspectral images and such
methods generally obtained good classification performance. Compared with the performance of original
full bands and the optimal band intervals selected based on the prior information, the result illustrates
that optimal intervals contain enough information for classification and the structure of grouped
convolution can urge the classifier to extract the information distributed in the optimal interval. Trained in
an end-to-end manner, CNN combined with spectral prior knowledge can be used as a reliable model for
varieties identification of wheat kernels.

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5. Conclusions
This paper aimed to propose a novel approach of using hyperspectral images combined with CNN
models for varieties identification of wheat kernels. The classification result of 8 varieties of wheat
kernels by the full wavelength CNN model achieved more than 90%, which showed the hyperspectral
images with the CNN classification model were feasible for wheat kernels. In order to simplify the CNN
model, three spectral wavelength interval selection methods (iCR, BiPLS and iRF) were as prior knowledge
first to reduce the input dimension. The optimal interval contained some crucial information about
varieties discrimination, and the interval CNN model based on the spectral prior information has a similar
classification accuracy to the full wavelength CNN model. Then, two convolutional structures (FC and
GC) of CNN models were introduced to extract features. The GC models outperformed all the FC models,
confirming that the ability of GC combined with spectral prior knowledge in representing the spectral
difference of different varieties of wheat kernels is excellent. It was more conducive to extracting the
information distributed in the hyperspectral images, in which the convolution kernel extracted the
different features contained in different intervals.

In summary, the GC-CNN models with spectral wavelength interval provided accurate and rapid
identification of wheat kernel variety which would help to develop an online system for quality detection
of wheat kernels as well as other crop seeds. The combination of hyperspectral imaging, CNN, and
spectral prior knowledge will become a powerful tool for large-scale crop seed detection in the modern
agriculture industry.

Declarations
Ethics approval and consent to participate Not applicable

Consent for publication Not applicable

Competing interests The authors have no competing interests to declare that are relevant to the content
of this article. 

Author contributions Haotian Que and Xin Zhao wrote the main manuscript text, Xiulan Sun worked on
formal analysis and investigation, Qibing Zhu and Min Huang completed the analysis and interpretation
of data. All authors reviewed the manuscript.

Funding This work was supported by the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities under
Grant JUSRP121017, High level project of Jiangsu Province under Grant JSSCBS20210858 and National
Nature Science Foundation of China under Grant 61775086.

Availability of data and materials The datasets analysed during the current study are available from the
corresponding author on reasonable request.

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Figures

Figure 1

The schematic diagram of the visible/near-infrared hyperspectral imaging system

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Figure 2

The raw spectral data extraction. (a) The hyperspectral image cube of wheat kernels. (b) Pseudo RGB
image of the raw spectral image with the background. (c) The binary mask for extracting regions of
interest (d) The hyperspectral image cube of regions of interest (einkorn wheat) (e) The raw spectra of
wheat kernels

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Figure 3

Example of continuum removal. (a) The raw spectral profile (black line) and the continuum profile (red
line). (b) The spectral profile after continuum removal

Figure 4

The architectures of the proposed FC-CNN models for wheat kernel classification

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Figure 5

The architectures of the proposed GC-CNN combined with feature wavelength intervals

Figure 6

Spectral profiles of the 8 varieties of wheat kernels. (a) Raw spectral profiles of the 8 varieties of wheat
kernels. (b) Spectral profiles of the 8 varieties of wheat kernels after continuum removal

Figure 7

The results of the spectral wavelength interval selection. The area with a light blue background represents
the interval selected by the method in the title of the subplot.

Figure 8

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The relationship between iteration and training accuracy. To clearly observe the accuracy change of
5000-10000 iterations, the accuracy curve is enlarged and placed in the middle of the image

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