Received: 6 April 2021 Revised: 12 May 2021 Accepted: 31 May 2021

DOI: 10.1111/jfpe.13767

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

Identification of soybean varieties based on hyperspectral

imaging technology and one-dimensional convolutional
neural network

Hao Li1,2 | Liu Zhang1,2 | Heng Sun1,2 | Zhenhong Rao3 | Haiyan Ji1,2

1
Key Laboratory of Modern Precision
Agriculture System Integration Research, Abstract
Ministry of Education, China Agricultural Variety identification of seeds is essential to ensure the purity and yield of the vari-
University, Beijing, China
2 ety. A model based on hyperspectral imaging technology and one-dimensional con-
Key Laboratory of Agricultural Information
Acquisition Technology Ministry of volutional neural network (1D CNN) was proposed to distinguish soybean seed
Agriculture, China Agricultural University,
varieties in this article. A total of 3,600 soybean seeds (900 seeds per variety) of
Beijing, China
3
College of Science, China Agricultural hyperspectral images in the spectral range of 866.4–1,701.0 nm were collected.
University, Beijing, China Traditional machine learning models (k-nearest neighbor, support vector machines,
Correspondence partial least squares discriminant analysis) and 1D CNN model were established
Haiyan Ji, Key Laboratory of Modern Precision based on different numbers of sample sets. The 1D CNN model was the most stable
Agriculture System Integration Research,
Ministry of Education, China Agricultural and had the highest classification accuracy, higher than 98%. Fivefold cross validation
University, Beijing 100083, China. was used to evaluate the model, and the model achieved an accuracy of more than
Email: yuntian@cau.edu.cn
95% in both the training set and the validation set. Finally, the t-distributed stochastic
Funding information neighbor embedding was used to visualize the feature values extracted by 1D CNN.
National Key Research and Development
Program, Grant/Award Number: The research results demonstrated that the 1D CNN model maintained good classifica-
2016YFD0200602 tion performance in soybean seed classification and had good application prospects in
hyperspectral imaging technology.

Practical Applications
Variety identification of soybean seeds is essential to ensure the purity and yield of
the variety. Different soybean varieties have different genetic purity, physical purity,
germination ability and vigor, which are related to quality attributes, such as nutri-
tional value, stress resistance, and final yield. In the past, most soybeans were identi-
fied using traditional machine learning algorithms combined with near-infrared
hyperspectral imaging technology to build models. This requires a series of opera-
tions, such as smoothing preprocessing and dimensionality reduction on hyper-
spectral data. These steps are too cumbersome and are not conducive to online
hyperspectral monitoring systems. The results of this study show that it is feasible to
use one-dimensional convolutional neural network combined with hyperspectral
technology to identify soybean seeds, and it also provides a new idea for building an
online detection system in the future.

J Food Process Eng. 2021;e13767. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/jfpe © 2021 Wiley Periodicals LLC. 1 of 14

https://doi.org/10.1111/jfpe.13767
2 of 14
1 | I N T RO DU CT I O N
Soybean (Glycine max (L.) Merrill) is widely cultivated as one of the
most significant agricultural products in the world. Soybeans contain
on average 40% protein, 35% carbohydrate, 20% oil, and 5% ash
(Lee, Grover, & Choung, 2011). It is the main source of protein and fat
for human and animal consumption. Soybean oil accounts for 56% of
the world's vegetable oil production. The world's soybean oil con-
sumption is second only to palm oil. Previous research has shown that
consuming soybean brought a range of benefits, including reducing
the risk of cancer, heart disease and osteoporosis (Lee et al., 2011).
Soybean is rich in vitamins, minerals, isoflavones, and folic acid. In
recent years, identification of soybean seed properties such as geno-
type (Du et al., 2017) and protein content (Min, Gupta, Agrawal,
Rakwal, & Kim, 2019) has become a significant research direction.
Genetic genes, physical purity, and germination ability are different in
different soybean varieties, which are related to quality attributes
such as nutritional value, resistance to stress and yield (Bender,
Haegele, & Below, 2015; Maria John, Natarajan, & Luthria, 2016;
McCarville, Marett, Mullaney, Gebhart, & Tylka, 2017). These quality
attributes of soybean have become the most vital parameters for
producers. Different soybean varieties have different quality attri-
butes, which makes the identification of soybean varieties become a
significant research topic.
Genetic analysis and technology based on chemometrics are
considered as powerful tools for accurately identifying seed varieties
(Satturu, Rani, Gattu, & Sreedhar, 2018; Tantasawat, Trongchuen,
Prajongjai, Jenweerawat, & Chaowiset, 2011). However, these
methods apply only to laboratory environments and operators also
need to have professional skills. What is more, these methods are
destructive, costly, and extremely inefficient. The subsequent
disposal of chemicals used in experiments is also a crucial issue. In
contrast, artificial visual recognition is a more convenient method,
but it is time-consuming and requires experts with rich experience
and knowledge. In addition, manual detection is highly subjective,
and staff are prone to visual fatigue, especially in the face of a large
number of samples appear powerless. Therefore, there is an urgent
need for a method that can quickly and nondestructively identify
soybean seeds.
In recent years, with the rapid development of nondestructive
determination technology, machine vision technology, near-infrared
(NIR) spectroscopy technology and hyperspectral imaging (HSI) tech-
nology have been used for grain identification by researchers. Different
soybean varieties show some differences in appearance characteristics
(including texture characteristics, color, damage, etc.), internal chemical
composition and other aspects. Due to its high-efficiency, nonchemical
and easy-to-operate advantages, machine vision technology is consid-
ered to be a fast and nondestructive seed identification method based
on differences in external characteristics (Kiratiratanapruk, 2011).
However, for soybean varieties with very similar external characteris-
tics, machine vision technology is difficult to obtain satisfactory results.
In addition to external attributes, the differences in the chemical com-
position of soybeans are also of great significance for the determination
LI ET AL.
of soybean seed varieties. NIR spectroscopy is widely used to identify
seed varieties. By analyzing the high vibration frequency absorption of
chemical bonds such as C─H, O─H, and N─H in the NIR region
between 780 and 2,500 nm, the corresponding functional groups or
corresponding chemical substances can be found through spectral
fingerprint to realize the corresponding analysis (Zhang & Ji, 2019).
However, the NIR spectroscopy technology can only collect
spectral information in a partial area of the sample, so it is not
satisfactory in terms of detection accuracy (Ferrari, Mottola, &
Quaresima, 2004).
As a combination of machine vision technology and spectral
analysis technology, HSI technology can obtain both the image infor-
mation and the spectral information of the sample (Sun, Zhang, Rao, &
Ji, 2020). Since hyperspectral technology can obtain hyperspectral
cube data of a large number of samples at one time, it overcomes the
limitations of machine vision technology and traditional spectral analy-
sis technology, making HSI technology unique in the identification
and quality inspection of agricultural products. HSI technology has
been widely used in variety identification (Cao, Li, Ge, Wu, &
Jiao, 2019; Huang, Tang, Yang, & Zhu, 2016; Li et al., 2019; Pang,
Men, Yan, & Xiao, 2020; Wu et al., 2019; Xia et al., 2019; Zhang,
Dai, & Cheng, 2020a; Zhu et al., 2020), quality identification
(Ambrose, Mohan, Kim, Lee, & Cho, 2016; Liu et al., 2020; Shrestha,
Knapič, Žibrat, Deleuran, & Gislum, 2016; Yang, Wang, Zhuang,
Yoon, & Jiang, 2021; Zhang, Dai, & Cheng, 2020b; Zhao et al., 2021),
and prediction of chemical composition (Sun et al., 2019; Sun
et al., 2020; Zhang et al., 2017; Zhang & Guo, 2020). Guo et al. com-
bined the k-nearest neighbor (KNN) algorithm and guided filtering to
classify hyperspectral images (Guo, Cao, Han, Sun, & Bai, 2018). The
experimental results showed that this method achieved better perfor-
mance than the improved support vector machine (SVM). Shrestha
et al. used NIR hyperspectral technology combined with partial
least square discriminant analysis (PLS-DA) and principal component
analysis (PCA) to identify the quality of four varieties of tomato seeds
(Shrestha et al., 2016). In addition, Huang et al. used hyperspectral
reflection images of four different varieties of corn seeds at 400–
1,000 nm in combination with least squares SVM and incremental
support vector data description for model updating to establish a clas-
sification model. The classification accuracy of the model reached
94.4% (Huang et al., 2016). Liu et al. used HSI technology combined
with MI-NRS band selection algorithm, extreme learning machine
(ELM) algorithm and Savitzky–Golay smoothing preprocessing method
to identify heat-damaged soybeans, with a classification accuracy of
99.8% (Liu et al., 2020). In these studies, relatively few samples were
used to establish discriminant models. Hyperspectral technology
combined with traditional machine learning algorithms was widely
used, but the discrimination accuracy of different varieties was neither
high nor stable.
Deep learning is a new research direction in the field of machine
learning. In recent years, deep learning has enabled machines to
imitate human activities such as audiovisual and thinking, which has
solved many complex pattern recognition problems and makes great
progress in artificial intelligence-related technologies (Yu, Hong,
LI ET AL.
Rui, & Tao, 2018; Ze, Senior, & Schuster, 2013). Through multilayer
processing, the deep learning algorithm gradually transforms the ini-
tial low-level feature representation into high-level feature represen-
tation, and then can complete complex learning tasks such as
classification with a simple model. Therefore, deep learning can be
understood as feature learning or representation learning. Deep
learning is used to learn the internal rules and representation
levels of sample data. The information obtained in the learning pro-
cess is of great help to the interpretation of data such as text,
images, and sounds. Compared with the traditional neural network,
its most prominent feature is that the corresponding optimization
algorithm is more effective with the increase of hidden layers. Zhu
et al. used hyperspectral technology combined with migration learn-
ing to classify ten soybean varieties based on six models including
AlexNet, ResNet18, Xception, InceptionV3, NASNetLarge, and
DenseNet201, with accuracy rates above 90% (Zhu et al., 2020).
Pang et al. used SVMs, ELMs, and one-dimensional convolutional
neural networks (1D CNN) to collect hyperspectral data for modeling
to classify four varieties of corn seeds. Among them, 1D CNN per-
formed best, and the 2D CNN model based on hyperspectral images
achieved a recognition accuracy of 99.96% (Pang et al., 2020). Wu
et al. used a deep convolutional neural network model based on HSI
to classify oat seeds, and achieved the highest accuracy of 99.19%
on the testing set (Wu et al., 2019). Deep learning algorithm has
gradually become the optimum selection for establishing non-
destructive testing model. In this study, NIR hyperspectral technol-
ogy was used to obtain spectral information of different varieties of
soybean seeds. The soybean classification models were established
based on deep learning and traditional machine learning algorithms,
and their effects were compared.
The specific goals of this study are to: (a) test the identification
ability of the model based on NIR hyperspectral technology and 1D
CNN for soybean seeds; (b) compare the effects of classification
models based on 1D CNN and machine learning algorithms;
(c) evaluate the generalization and stability of the 1D CNN model
through k-fold cross-validation; and (d) visualize the distribution
characteristics of the original spectral data and the data processed
by 1D CNN to prove the effectiveness of the model.
2 | MATERIALS AND METHODS
2.1 | Material preparation
The soybean seeds used in this experiment were purchased from a
seed market in Beijing, China and contained four different varieties:
Zhonghuang13 (ZH13), Zhonghuang37 (ZH37), Zhonghuang39
(ZH39), and Zhonghuang57 (ZH57). The number of each variety of
seeds was 900, totaling 3,600 seeds. All the seeds harvested in 2020
were packed in plastic bags and their moisture content was controlled
to minimize the impact of the environment on the quality of seeds.
The four varieties are encoded as 0, 1, 2, 3 in order of ZH13/ZH37/
ZH39/ZH57 for later data analysis.
3 of 14
2.2 | Hyperspectral system
The “GaiaSorter” HSI system produced by Zolix Co., Ltd. (Beijing,
China) was selected for this experiment. This system is mainly com-
posed of uniform light source, spectroscopic camera, electronically
controlled mobile platform, computer and control software. The cam-
era used in the spectral imager is a NIR enhanced hyperspectral
camera of the “image-λ” series of Zolix Co., Ltd., and its spectral range
is 866.4–1,701.0 nm. The uniform light source consists of two 200w
bromine tungsten lamps. The light emitted by the light source is
uniformly illuminated by thermal radiation, and the unevenness of the
light source within the volume of the cube 300
20
100 mm
(length
width
height) is within 5%, which meets the uniformity of
the light source during the test of samples of different volumes. The
entire HSI system is shown in Figure 1. The working principle of
the system is to place the sample to be tested on an electric mobile
platform controlled by software, and use a push-broom method to
collect images (Elmasry, Mandour, Al-Rejaie, Belin, & Rousseau, 2019).
With the movement of the electric platform, the hyperspectral cube
data containing the spectrum information and image information of
the tested samples are finally obtained.
2.3 | Spectral data extraction
Before starting this experiment, the power supply was turned on to
warm up the HSI system for 30 min to eliminate errors such as baseline
drift caused by the system. Then, the system's control software
SpecView (SpecView Ltd., Uckfield, UK) was run to conduct a series of
tests such as focusing, and finally the exposure time was determined
0.02 s and the moving speed of the electric mobile platform was
0.50 cm/s. In this experiment, all the experimental samples were placed
on a black cardboard with extremely low reflectivity, so that the sam-
ples were better separated from the background when extracting data
later. During the data collection period, To avoid the interference of
external light, the whole system was in a closed environment After the
data were collected, black and white correction of the obtained data
were required to reduce the influence of dark current and other noise
on the image (Zhao et al., 2018). The specific operation steps are as fol-
lows: in the same collection environment, the image collected by aiming
the camera at the whiteboard is IW, and then the lens cap of the camera
is capped, and the collected image is IB. The correction formula is:
IO  IB
IC ¼ ð1Þ
IW  IB
where IC is the corrected hyperspectral image, IO is the original hyper-
spectral image, IB is the all black calibration image, and IW is the all-
white calibration image. The software for correcting the image is
SpecView (the control software of the “GaiaSorter” HSI system). In
this study, a total of 36 hyperspectral images were collected and
processed. Each soybean variety included nine hyperspectral images.
There were 100 samples in each hyperspectral image.
4 of 14 LI ET AL.

FIGURE 1 Hyperspectral imaging system structure diagram

FIGURE 2 Flowchart of hyperspectral data extraction

2.4 | Spectral data collection image to finally extract the spectral data. As shown in Figure 2: (a) using
the Canny edge detector to extract the edge, corrosion and dilate the
Since the data collected by the hyperspectral system is hyperspectral seeds in the corrected hyperspectral image; (b) binarizing to generate a
cube data, it is necessary to perform a series of processing on the original mask and segment the original image to remove background;
LI ET AL.
(c) extracting the entire area of each soybean seed on the image as a
region of interest (ROI), and then calculating the average reflectivity of all
pixels of the ROI as the spectral value of each soybean seed.
2.5 | Data analysis methods
In this experiment, four different methods, KNN, SVM, PLS-DA, and
1D CNN were used to classify soybean seeds. The t-distributed
stochastic neighbor embedding (t-SNE) was used to verify the ability
of 1D CNN to extract features.
2.5.1 | K-nearest neighbor
The KNN method is a theoretically mature method and one of the
simplest machine learning algorithms. This method only determines
the category of the sample to be classified based on the category of
the nearest one or several samples in the decision-making of classifi-
cation (Bao, Mi, Wu, Liu, & He, 2019). In this study, an automatic
parameter optimization procedure was used to determine the k value
of the model and the default settings were used for other parameters
(k = 5, weights = “uniform,” algorithm = “auto,” leaf_size = 30,
p = 2, metric = “minkowski”).
2.5.2 | Support vector machine
SVM is a kind of generalized linear classifier for binary classification of
data by supervised learning. Its decision boundary is the maximum-
margin hyperplane for learning samples. SVM can be classified
nonlinearly by kernel method, which is one of the common kernel
learning methods (Feng et al., 2018). The RBF kernel function was
used in this study, which can effectively handle linear and nonlinear
data. The hyperparameter (C, gamma) were determined by the grid
search method to be (1e5, 0.0001).
FIGURE 3 One-dimensional convolutional neural network structure diagram
5 of 14
2.5.3 | PLS discriminant analysis
PLS-DA is a discriminant analysis method in multivariate data analysis
technology. It is often used to deal with classification and discriminant
problems. It is considered as a supervision method to maximize the
distinction between samples (Almeida, Fidelis, Barata, & Poppi, 2013).
In this study, only the average spectrum of the sample was regarded
as the X variable, and the Y variable was determined by the code rule,
so that ZH13 was code 0, ZH37 was code 1, ZH39 was code 2, and
ZH57 was code 3. The training set and the testing set were divided at
a ratio of 3:1.
2.5.4 | One-dimensional convolutional neural
network
The 1D CNN is composed of a combination of a convolutional layer
and a fully connected layer. The architecture of 1D CNN is shown in
Figure 3. The model has four convolution modules, and each convolu-
tion module includes a convolution layer and a batch normalization
(BN) layer, and five fully connected layers. The number of filters of
the four convolutional layers is set to 16, 32, 64, 128, and the specific
parameters of each convolutional layer: the size of the one-
dimensional convolution kernel is 1
4, the stride is 2, and the pad-
ding is 1. After inputting one-dimensional data with a length of
224 columns through each convolutional layer, its length is shortened
to half of the original. In this way, local features of spectral informa-
tion can be extracted quickly, the dimension of spectral data can be
reduced, and the nonlinearity of processing can be increased. The
spectral data of soybean seeds are processed by four convolution
modules, and then all neurons are tiled into a one-dimensional struc-
ture, and then they are fed into five fully connected layers. The num-
ber of neurons in the five fully connected layers is set to 512, 256,
128, 64, and 4, and all parameters are shown in Table 1.
To reduce the influence of gradient disappearance and gradient
explosion problems, a linear unit with leakage correction (Leaky ReLU)
6 of 14 LI ET AL.

TABLE 1 Architecture of one-dimensional convolutional neural network

No. Operation In channels Out channels Kernel size Stride Padding Feature size BN? Activation function
1 Conv1 1 16 (1,4) 2 1 (1,1,224) ! (16,1,112) Yes ReLU
2 Conv2 16 32 (1,4) 2 1 (16,1,112) ! (32,1,56) Yes ReLU
3 Conv3 32 64 (1,4) 2 1 (32,1,56) ! (64,1,28) Yes ReLU
4 Conv4 64 128 (1,4) 2 1 (64,1,28) ! (128,1,14) Yes ReLU
5 Flatten (128,1,14) ! (1,1792)
6 Fc1 (1,1792) ! (1,512) No ReLU
7 Fc2 (1,512) ! (1,256) No ReLU
8 Fc3 (1,256) ! (1,128) No ReLU
9 Fc4 (1,128) ! (1,64) No ReLU
10 Softmax (1,64 ! (1,4)

Note: “Out channels” means the number of convolution kernels; “Conv” means the convolutional layer; “FC” means the fully connected layer; “BN?”
means whether to perform batch normalization.

was used as the activation function unit. The Leaky ReLU function is a
variant of the classic and widely used ReLU activation function. The
output of this function has a small slope for negative input. Since
the derivative is always nonzero, this can reduce the appearance of
silent neurons, allow gradient-based learning, and solve the problem
of neurons not learning after the ReLU function enters the negative
interval. As shown in the following formula:

x, x > 0
Leaky ReLUðxÞ ¼ , ð2Þ
αx, x ≤ 0
beta_2 of 0.999 was used to minimize the loss function. The optimiza-
tion algorithm is an extension of the stochastic gradient descent
method, which can be implemented simply and directly, has fast calcu-
lation efficiency and small memory usage, and is very suitable for data
and/or parameter problems. To monitor and prevent overfitting prob-
lems during the training process, all data sets were divided into train-
ing sets and validation sets at a ratio of 3:1. The mini-batch training
methods with a batch size of 5 was selected to achieve higher accu-
racy and faster model convergence. The number of iterations of train-
ing was determined by the performance of the model.

where x represents the feature value that needs to be activated in the

neuron, the value of α is generally 0.01. During the training process,
the input distribution of each layer is constantly changing, which
makes the next layer need to constantly adapt to the new data distri-
bution. In deep neural networks, this makes training very complicated
and slow. For this, it is often necessary to set a smaller learning rate
and stricter parameter initialization. The mean and variance of the
small batch are used to adjust the output of the neural network
through using BN during the training of the model. So that the output
between each layer conforms to the same Gaussian distribution of
mean and variance, which makes the data more stable. No matter
how the parameters of the hidden layer change, it can be determined
that the mean and variance of the output data of the previous layer
are known and fixed, which solves the problems of slow training and
small learning rate caused by the continuous change of data distribu-
tion. Ioffe et al. proposed BN to normalize the input of each layer
(Ioffe & Szegedy, 2015). In this study, before the activation function
and after each convolution calculation, BN was used, which was called
a BN layer. The softmax function was commonly used in multi-
classification process. It maps the output of multiple neurons into
(0,1) intervals, which can be understood as probabilities. The cross-
entropy loss function was used to determine the closeness between
the actual output and the expected output, which depicts the distance
between the two probability distributions. The adaptive moment
estimation algorithm with a learning rate of 0.001, beta_1 of 0.9, and
2.5.5 | k-Fold cross validation
To be able to better evaluate the model, k-fold cross-validation was
used to evaluate the 1D CNN model. k-Fold cross-validation is to
divide all data into k subsamples, a single subsample is reserved as
the data for the verification model, that is, the validation set,
and the other k-1 subsamples are used for training, that is, the training
set. The cross-validation is repeated k times, and each subsample is
verified once, and the performance of the average k times is taken as
the final result, as shown in Figure 4. Compared with the traditional
method of model evaluation (dividing a fixed training set and testing
set), the advantage of k-fold cross-validation is to avoid problems cau-
sed by unreasonable data set division, such as overfitting the model
on the training set. And this overfitting may not be caused by the
model, but by the unreasonable division of the data set. In this study,
fivefold cross-validation was chosen to evaluate the 1D CNN model.
When performing fivefold cross-validation, 250 training rounds were
selected in each fold cross-validation.
2.5.6 | t-SNE method
Because the computational process of convolutional neural net-
works is less interpretable and cannot be observed, the t-SNE
LI ET AL.
FIGURE 4 Fivefold cross-validation
diagram
method was used to visualize the features of the hidden layer and
the original spectral data (Nie, Zhang, Feng, Yu, & He, 2019). t-SNE
is a dimension reduction technology, which is used to represent
high-dimensional data sets in 2D or 3D low-dimensional space, so
as to visualize them. Compared with other dimensionality reduction
algorithms (such as PCA), t-SNE creates a reduced feature space.
Similar samples are modeled by nearby points, and dissimilar
samples are modeled by far points with high probability (Yang,
Zhao, & Chan, 2017). In addition, t-SNE is a technology that inte-
grates dimension reduction and visualization. It is an improvement
based on SNE visualization, which solves the characteristics of
crowded sample distribution and unobvious boundary of SNE after
visualization, and is a good dimension reduction visualization
method at present.
2.5.7 | Software tools
The spectral values of all pixels in the ROI were calculated on ENVI
5.3 (ITT Visual Information Solutions, Boulder, UT). Image processing
and the establishment of PLS-DA model, KNN model, and SVM
model were carried out in MATLAB R2018b (The MathWorks,
Natick, MA). Python 3.8.3 (https://www.python.org/) with Jupyter
Notebook was used to build a 1D CNN model. The well-known deep
learning framework Pytorch (https://pytorch.org/) was used to pro-
gram the architecture of the 1D CNN model, which run in the central
processing unit.
7 of 14
3 | RESULTS AND ANALYSIS
3.1 | Raw spectra analysis
The original spectral wavelength range of soybean seeds is 886.4–
1,701.0 nm. To eliminate the influence of the external environment
and camera performance, the spectral information in the range of
918.1–1,653.8 nm was collected by removing the bands with obvious
noise in the front and the rear. The spectral data were normalized
before modeling. As shown in Figure 5a, a total of 224 wavelengths
were included for analysis. The average spectra of each species are
shown in Figure 5b. It can be seen from Figure 5 that the trends of
the average spectral curves of the four soybean varieties were very
similar and difficult to distinguish. However, due to the different
chemical composition of different varieties of soybeans such as pro-
tein, fat and dietary fiber, the spectral characteristics of different vari-
eties of soybeans are very different within certain specific wavelength
ranges. For example, in the wavelength range of 918.1–1,100.0 nm,
the spectral reflectance of ZH13 was significantly higher than that of
the other three varieties, while in the range of 1,250.0–1,330.0 nm,
the spectral reflectance of ZH39 was significantly lower than the
other three varieties. In the wavelength range of 918.1–1,100.0 nm
and 1,250.0–1,330.0 nm, the order of spectral reflectance from high
to low was: ZH13/ZH57/ZH37/ZH39, and this difference was most
obvious near 1,300.0 nm. At 1,000.0–1,100.0 nm, it mainly corre-
sponds to the third overtone of N─H stretching, and 1,100.0–
1,300.0 nm mainly corresponds to the second overtone of C─H
8 of 14 LI ET AL.

FIGURE 5 The spectra of soybean seeds. (a) The spectrum of all soybean seeds. (b) The average spectrum of four soybean varieties

TABLE 2 Discrimination results of soybean seeds varieties by different models

The number of Discriminant The accuracy The accuracy Training

Varieties of seeds each seed variety model of training set (%) of testing set (%) time (s)
ZH13 and ZH37 900 SVM 99.63 98.89 1.85
900 KNN 97.78 97.33 0.35
PLS-DA 99.41 98.44 0.26
1D CNN 100 99.78 2,082.07
ZH13, ZH37, 900 SVM 98.77 97.04 5.11
and ZH39 900 KNN 94.78 93.80 0.57
900 PLS-DA 96.44 96.30 0.42
1D CNN 99.56 99.11 3,169.54
ZH13, ZH37, ZH39, 900 SVM 95.67 92.56 6.05
and ZH57 900 KNN 88.58 85.75 0.87
900 PLS-DA 73.10 71.40 0.63
900 1D CNN 99.67 98.89 3,948.23

Abbreviations: 1D CNN, one-dimensional convolutional neural network; KNN, k-nearest neighbor; PLS-DA, partial least squares discriminant analysis;
SVM, support vector machine; ZH13, Zhonghuang13; ZH37, Zhonghuang37; ZH39, Zhonghuang39; ZH57, Zhonghuang57.

stretching (Ferrari et al., 2004). However, due to the overlapping of
spectral curves, it is not reliable to identify different varieties of soy-
bean seeds based on the reflectance difference of spectral curves.
Therefore, it is necessary to establish models to effectively extract
and utilize spectral features for soybean seed classification.
3.2 | Classification results and analysis
In this step, SVM, KNN, PLS-DA, and 1D CNN were used to establish
model based on 224 bands. Table 2 shows the discrimination results
of soybean seeds under four different models. For different varieties
of soybean seeds, the results of various models were obviously differ-
ent. Among them, the performance of the PLS-DA model decreased
as the number of soybean seed varieties increased. When the number
of varieties of input seeds in the model increased from two to four,
the accuracy of the training set of the model decreased from 99.41 to
73.10%, and the accuracy of the testing set decreased from 98.44
to 71.40%. PLS-DA is a linear classification method that combines
PLS regression and classification technology. When the number of
classifications increased, the accuracy of the method was greatly
reduced. The KNN model had a similar situation. When the number of
soybean varieties increased to four, the accuracy of the testing set
decreased from 97.33 to 85.75%, which was slightly smaller than the
PLD-DA model. The KNN method mainly relies on the surrounding
limited nearby samples rather than the method of discriminating the
category domain to determine the category. Therefore, the KNN
method was slightly better than the PLS-DA model for the sample set
LI ET AL.
to be divided with more cross or overlap of the class domain. How-
ever, this algorithm is often not effective for data sets with many
features (a few hundreds or more) and data sets with a large
amount of data. SVM is a nonlinear machine learning algorithm and
nonlinear hyperplanes are used to classify complex data. With the
increase in the number of soybean seed varieties, the discrimina-
tion result of the SVM model declined slightly, and the final accu-
racy rates on the training set and testing set were 95.67 and
92.56%, respectively. When the number of varieties of soybean
seeds was four, the 1D CNN model achieved 99.67 and 98.89%
accuracy on the training set and testing set, respectively, which
was better than SVM when identifying four different varieties of
soybean seeds. As shown in Table 2, with the increase in the num-
ber of soybean varieties, the discrimination results of 1D CNN
remained stable, and the accuracy of the training set and testing
set were always greater than 99 and 98%, respectively. 1D CNN
F I G U R E 6 The loss and accuracy curves of one-dimensional convolutional neural network (1D CNN) model of soybean seeds. Classifications
of two (a), three (b), and four (c) varieties of soybean seeds
9 of 14
model and SVM model performed better as nonlinear algorithms
than linear algorithms. Although the SVM and 1D CNN model can
maintain a relatively stable classification level with high perfor-
mance, when the number of input seeds was four for the SVM
model, the difference between the recognition accuracy of the
training set and the testing set had reached more than 3%, which
indicated that the model had been overfitted. Because the spectral
data contains many deep features, it is obviously more effective to
use the deep neural network model. Deep learning model is usually
a deep architecture, and compared with traditional shallow classi-
fier, deep architecture can extract more abstract data features, thus
obtaining better performance level. In addition, in the process of
training the deep learning model, methods such as BN and dropout
can be used to reduce overfitting and improve the stability of the
discriminant model. In this article, because in the process of using
and debugging dropout, although the model stability had increased,
10 of 14 LI ET AL.

the accuracy of the model had dropped significantly, so instead of
using dropout, only BN was used. With the increasing number of
soybean seed varieties, compared with SVM, KNN, and PLS-DA
model, the accuracy of 1D CNN model was significantly improved.
In addition, the 1D CNN model used an optimization algorithm to
alleviate the overfitting problem of the model. Besides, compared
to the SVM, KNN, and PLS-DA models, the 1D CNN model
required longer training time. For example, in the classification of
four varieties, the training time of SVM, KNN, and PLS-DA models
were 6.05, 0.87, and 0.63 s, respectively. The training time of 1D
CNN was 3,948.23 s. However, the performance of the 1D CNN
model was superior to them. This was because many parameters in
deep neural networks needed to be optimized through multiple
iterations. What is more, when the training of the 1D CNN model

TABLE 3 Fivefold cross-validation results of 1D CNN

Varieties of seeds The number of seeds Training fold data (%) Validation fold data (%)
ZH13 and ZH37 1,800 99.94 99.16
ZH13, ZH37, and ZH39 2,700 99.06 98.75
ZH13, ZH37, ZH39, and ZH57 3,600 98.79 97.63

Abbreviations: 1D CNN, one-dimensional convolutional neural network; KNN, k-nearest neighbor; PLS-DA, partial least squares discriminant analysis;
SVM, support vector machines; ZH13, Zhonghuang13; ZH37, Zhonghuang37; ZH39, Zhonghuang39; ZH57, Zhonghuang57.

F I G U R E 7 The loss and accuracy curves of fivefold cross-validation of one-dimensional convolutional neural network (1D CNN) model.
Classifications of two (a), three (b), and four (c) varieties of soybean seeds
LI ET AL. 11 of 14

F I G U R E 8 The visualization maps of soybean seeds using t-distributed stochastic neighbor embedding (t-SNE). (a) t-SNE figures before one-
dimensional convolutional neural network (1D CNN) and (b) t-SNE figures after 1D CNN
12 of 14
was completed, the best performing model parameters were saved.
In this way, when facing the same scene later, the saved 1D CNN
model could be used directly.
The loss value and accuracy curve of the soybean seed discrimination
model based on 1D CNN are shown in Figure 6. As the epoch increases,
the loss value of the discriminant model continued to decrease, and the
accuracy continued to rise and tends to stabilize, which indicated that
the discriminant model based on 1D CNN had converged. To verify the
generalization and stability of the final 1D CNN model, fivefold cross-
validation was used to verify the model. The results are shown in Table 3.
The loss and accuracy curves of cross-validation are shown in Figure 7.
With the increase of soybean varieties, the accuracy of training fold data
and validation fold data was always higher than 98 and 97%, respectively,
which proved that the generalization and stability of the classification
model based on 1D CNN had certain advantages. Therefore, 1D CNN
has potential applications in seed classification based on HSI technology.
3.3 | Visualize data
To visually prove the effectiveness of 1D CNN in soybean seed classifica-
tion based on NIR hyperspectral technology, t-SNE was used to visualize
spectral data. In this article, by inputting the spectral data of the testing
set into the best trained 1D CNN model, the feature values of different
soybean varieties were collected from the previous layer of the softmax
layer of 1D CNN. Then t-SNE was used to visualize the original spectral
data and the feature values extracted from the 1D CNN model and
reduce these high-dimensional data to a two-dimensional plane for more
appropriate analysis. It can be clearly seen from Figure 8 that after the
original high-dimensional spectral data of the testing set was visualized by
t-SNE, the distribution of these data on the two-dimensional plane was
messy and overlapping. This also showed that it is impractical to classify
based on raw spectral data alone. After extracting features based on the
discriminant model established by 1D CNN, the feature points of these
different varieties of soybean seeds were clearly separated. As the num-
ber of soybean varieties increases, the visualization results became more
obvious. In all the visualizations, there were obvious boundaries between
the visualization data obtained from 1D CNN of different varieties of soy-
bean seeds. Of course, some misclassified points also were seen from the
visualization, and as the number of soybean varieties increases, the num-
ber of misclassified points was gradually increasing. This corresponds to
the testing set accuracy of the discriminant analysis model based on 1D
CNN in Table 2. Therefore, this method plays a very significant role in the
classification of different varieties of soybean seeds based on NIR HSI
technology. In addition, this method may explain the effectiveness of 1D
CNN in processing hyperspectral data of mixed seeds and establish a fast
visual classification method.
4 | C O N CL U S I O N S
In this study, a combination of NIR HSI technology and 1D CNN was
used to identify different varieties of soybean seeds. Four varieties of
LI ET AL.
soybean seeds were collected to obtain spectral information. 1D CNN
model was used to establish a discriminant model for classifying soy-
bean seed varieties, and the results of 1D CNN were compared with
those of discriminant models based on SVM, KNN, and PLS-DA.
With the increase in the number of soybean varieties, the performance
of 1D CNN remained excellent. When the number of soybean varieties
increased from two to four, compared with the results (70%) of the
PLS-DA model, the classification results of 1D CNN model remained
above 98%. When the number of soybean seeds increased from 1,800
to 3,600, compared with the results (85%) of the KNN model, the clas-
sification effect of 1D CNN model was still superior. The difference
between the accuracy (95.67%) of the training set and the accuracy
(92.56%) of the testing set of the SVM model was more than 3%, and
there was an overfitting phenomenon. However, the performance of
1D CNN remained stable, which reduced the problem of overfitting. At
the same time, the fivefold cross-validation method was used to verify
the generalization and stability of the 1D CNN model, and the results
showed that its generalization was quite good. In addition, t-SNE was
used to visualize the results of combining NIR hyperspectral technology
and deep learning. This method proved that it was feasible to use deep
learning model and NIR hyperspectral technology to classify soybean
seeds. This also proved that t-SNE was used to explain the effective-
ness of deep convolution neural network in seed classification. Then,
we will collect more varieties of soybean spectrum to expand the spec-
trum fingerprints. As the number of seed spectral data increases, a
model based on deep learning algorithms can be used to construct a
variety library to identify more different varieties of soybean seeds.
ACKNOWLEDG MENT
This research is supported by National Key Research and Develop-
ment Program (Project No. 2016YFD0200602).
CONFLIC T OF INT ER E ST
The authors declare no conflicts of interest.
AUTHOR CONTRIBU TIONS
Hao Li: Methodology; software; visualization; writing-original draft.
Liu Zhang: Conceptualization; data curation. Heng Sun: Conceptuali-
zation; data curation. Zhenhong Rao: Validation. Haiyan Ji: Funding
acquisition; resources; supervision.
OR CID
Hao Li https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2926-3707
Heng Sun https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2038-959X
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