The Repeatability and Discrimination Study of

Electronic Nose Features

Mazlina Mamat

Salina Abdul Samad

Faculty of Engineering and Built Environment

Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia
43600 UKM Bangi Selangor

Faculty of Engineering and Built Environment

Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia
43600 UKM Bangi Selangor

Abstract Four different features: degree of reaction, the

fractional relative response, the rate of reaction at the initial
absorption time and the accumulative total of the reaction
degree changing were extracted from the sensor response
curves of the electronic nose measurements on four different
brands cultured milk drink. The repeatability and the
discrimination ability of these four features were analyzed. The
results show that the degree of reaction exhibits the best
repeatability, followed by the fractional relative response, the
accumulative total of the reaction degree changing and the rate
of reaction at the initial absorption time, respectively. The
same observation was also recorded in the discrimination
ability of the features where the degree of reaction and the
fractional relative response show comparable performance, the
accumulative total of the reaction degree changing shows
slightly low performance while the initial absorption time fails
to perform.

(pasteurization or Ultra Heat Treatment) [5]. In the

researches by El Babri and colleagues, the average value of
initial conductance, the average value of steady state
conductance, the dynamic slope of conductance during
absorption phase and the total of the reaction degree
changing were used to assess the quality of beef, sheep meats
and Moroccan Sardines [6, 7].

Keywords-electronic
discriminative

I.

nose;

features;

The above researches prove that numerous features can

be extracted from a sensor response curve. In practice, any
points on the sensor response curve can be treated as
features, however how good it can represents the whole
curve and how stable it is must be studied. This paper
presents the analyses to determine the repeatability and
discrimination ability of four different features obtained from
the sensor response curves. The four features are the degree
of reaction, the fractional relative response, the rate of
reaction at the initial absorption time and the accumulative
total of the reaction degree changing.

repeatability;

II.

INTRODUCTION

The electronic nose is an apparatus that is used to detect

and to perform classification on odorous substances. It
detects odor by using a gas sensor array which produce a
specific pattern for specific substance. The produced pattern
is further analyzed by using appropriate data analysis
technique such as Principal Component Analysis (PCA),
Functional Discriminant Analysis (FDA) and Artificial
Neural Network (ANN) for classification or prediction
purposes. In electronic nose, the patterns used in the data
analysis technique are generated from the features of the
sensor response curve. There are several approaches used to
extract the features. The common approach is by considering
the steady state part or the transient response of the curve.
This approach was used by many researchers in various
applications. Panigrahi et al. used the accumulative total of
the reaction degree changing (area under the response curve),
the relative humidity during absorption and desorption, the
average temperature during measurement and the average
voltage value of carbon dioxide sensor to classify beef
samples into groups of unspoiled and spoiled [1]. Gomez et
al. used the ratio of conductivity at 42s of the sensor
response to monitor the storage shelf life of tomatoes [2] and
mandarin oranges [3]. Labreche et al. used the optimum
value of the resistance relative response curve to predict the
shelf life of milk [4]. The relative response of the resistance
was used by Brudzewski et al. in their research to
discriminate different types of milk processing

978-1-4577-0255-6/11/$26.00 2011 IEEE

APPROACH AND METHODS

A. Electronic Nose System

The E-Nose was fabricated at the Digital Signal
Processing Laboratory, University Kebangsaan Malaysia. It
consists of 5 key components: sample chamber, sensor
chamber, data acquisition system and controller unit, power
supply and a computer. The sample chamber is a cylindrical
glass bottle with 40ml volume. It was used to store the
cultured milk drink during measurement. The sample
chamber was connected to the sensor chamber via two
plastic tubes attached to an air diaphragm pump to increase
flow. The sensor chamber is an airtight box with
approximately 200ml volume and consists of 14 gas sensors
(TGS813, TGS821, TGS822, TGS825, TGS826, TGS830,
TGS2180, TGS2600, TGS2602, TGS2610, TGS2611,
TGS2612, TGS2620 and TGS6812) and one temperature
sensor (LM35DZ) (Table 1). The gas sensors operate to
produce odor print of the sample while the temperature
sensor is to monitor the sensor chamber temperature during
measurement. The voltage responses of all sensors were
amplified and adjusted to 0V to 5V analog voltage,
converted to digital value and transmitted to the serial port
using a data acquisition system and controller unit. A
graphic user interface program to control and to interpret the
measurement data was developed by using C++ Builder
software.

1185

TENCON 2011

TABLE I.
Sensor
TGS813
TGS821
TGS822
TGS825
TGS826
TGS830
TGS2180
TGS2600
TGS2602
TGS2610
TGS2611
TGS2612
TGS2620
TGS6812
LM35DZ

LIST OF SENSORS USED IN THE ELECTRONIC NOSE SYSTEM

Target gas
Combustible Gases (methane, propane, butane)
Hydrogen
Organic Solvent Vapors (ethanol)
Hydrogen Sulfide
Ammonia
Chlorofluorocarbons
Water vapor
Air Contaminants (hydrogen, carbon monoxide)
Air Contaminants (VOCs and odorous gases )
LP Gas and its component gases
Methane
Methane and LP Gases
Alcohol and Solvent Vapors
Hydrogen, Methane and LP Gas
Temperature sensor

Figure 1. The sensor response curve.

C. Samples
The samples measured in the experiment were 4
different brands of cultured milk drinks of original flavor
purchased from a local supermarket. A total of 12 bottles of
Vitagen, 10 bottles of Solivite, 10 bottles of Nutrigen and 8
bottles of Yakult were used in the experiment. To maintain
the freshness of the cultured milk drinks, they were stored
unopened in 4oC freezer and were placed in ambient
temperature about 30 minutes prior to experiment.

B. Electronic Nose Measurement and Feature Selection

The measurement starts by performing the base line
correction to the sensors by purging the sensors with
atmospheric air for 200 s. This is to ensure that the sensors
are completely free from possible contaminated odors from
previous measurement. Then the sampling chamber which
contains the sample was attached to the sensor chamber and
the odor was sucked into the airtight sensor chamber for
200s. Next, the sensor chamber was cleaned again for
another 200 s by purging the sensor chamber with ambient
air. The ambient air is used without any pretreatment and
was proven to sufficiently clean the sensors from previous
measurement. The time required for cleaning and sampling is
10 minutes (600 s = 200s + 200s + 200s) and during the
process, the voltage reading of the sensors were acquired and
saved.

D. Performance criteria
The repeatability of features can be determined by
computing the Relative Standard Deviation (RSD) of each
feature. Feature with less RSD value indicates higher
repeatability. The small RSD values indicate that the sensors
show relatively good precision hence confirm the
repeatability of the measurements. The RSD of sensor i is
given by the following equation:

From the sensor response curve obtained in the

measurement, four different features were extracted. The
features are:
The degree of reaction (d),

d = Vmax Vmin

(Vmax Vmin )
Vmin

(5)

where = standard deviation, and = average value of the

feature. Usually the RSD value is presented in the
percentage form.
PCA is a common pattern recognition algorithm used to
analyze data obtained from electronic nose system [8,9,10].
In particular, PCA is used to reduce the complexity of data
by computing a new, much smaller set of uncorrelated
variables which best represent the original data. This is done
by projecting the high dimensional data set in a dimensional
reduced space based on the uncorrelated and orthogonal
eigenvectors of the covariance matrix computed from the enose features. These eigenvectors were called principal
components of the features and were arranged in sequence
where the first principal component was the one with the
greatest amount of variance, followed by the second greatest
and so on. The plot of the original data in the new space
defined by the first few principal components will give
visual interpretation on how the original data are scattered.

(2)

The rate of reaction at the initial absorption time (rt),

rt =

i
i

The relative response (r),

r=

RSDi =

(1)

(Vt = 250 Vt = 201 )

50

(3)

The accumulative total of the reaction degree

changing (i),
t

i = dt
0

(4)

The accumulative total of the reaction degree changing is

equivalent to the area below the response curve. This area
was computed by using the trapezoidal rule. The sensor
response curve and the corresponding parameters used to
compute the four features are displayed in Fig. 1.

1186

In particular, the plot will shows features that have small

variation appear together while the features with large
variation appear distant. Therefore PCA is able to expose
some clusters of the data naturally.
III.

B. The repeatability of features

The analysis to determine which features show the best
repeatability was conducted on three cultured milk brands ie
Solivite, Vitagen and Nutrigen. In this analysis, 10ml of
milk were used and 3 consecutive measurements were
performed using the same sample obtained from the three
milk brands. The RSD of the 8 sensors and their average
were obtained for each feature. The results were presented
in Table 2. The RSD values indicate that the degree of
reaction was the most repeating feature among the four
features analyzed. This can be observed by the small RSD
score by this feature for the three milk brands which are 8.8,
5.5 and 11.8 for Vitagen, Solivite and Nutrigen,
respectively, with the average of 8.7. The relative response
and the accumulative of total reaction changing show good
repeatability with the average value of 11.7 and 12.2,
respectively. Among the four features, the rate of reaction
measured during the first 50 seconds of absorption show
worst repeatability with the average value obtained for the
three cultured milk drink brands is 52.9.

RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

A. The response of sensors

This analysis was conducted to examine the response of
the 14 sensors to the cultured milk drink odor.
In this analysis, one measurement was conducted to each
brand of cultured milk drink. The degree of reactions for the
14 sensors in the measurements of the four brands were
recorded and presented in Fig. 2. The chart shows that 8
sensors (TGS822, TGS813, TGS821, TGS2602, TGS826,
TGS2620, TGS825, and TGS2600) give significant
response to the cultured milk drink odor while the other 6
sensors (TGS830, TGS2180, TGS6812, TGS2610,
TGS2612 and TGS2611) give little or no response. It can be
noted that the TGS826 followed by TGS822 and TGS825
give strong response while the other 5 sensors give weaker
but yet still significant response. To observe the pattern
associated with each cultured milk drink brand, the degree
of reactions obtained for the four brands were plotted in
radar form presented in Fig. 3. The radar plot shows that the
four brands have quite similar patterns with different
magnitude for each sensor. The Vitagen and Solivite brands
emanate strongest odor, followed by Nutrigen and Yakult
brands. The 6 sensors which show little or no response to
the cultured milk odor were excluded from the next
analyses.

C. The discrimination of features

The PCA is used to determine the ability of the four
features to discriminate between 4 different brands of
cultured milk. In this analysis, the PCA was performed on
the whole data set and the score values obtained were
plotted in Fig. 4 for degree of reaction, Fig. 5 for relative
response, Fig. 6 for rate of reaction at initial absorption time
and Fig. 7 for accumulative total of the reaction degree
changing. These score plots show that the four brands are
obviously separated by the degree of reaction feature and
the relative response feature while adequately separated by
the accumulative total of the reaction degree changing
feature. The score plot for the rate of reaction at initial
absorption time indicates that this feature is unable to
discriminate the four brands effectively.

Figure 2. The degree of reaction of the 14 sensors.

TABLE 2. THE RSD VALUES OF THE 8 SENSORS
Features
Brand
Vitagen

rt

8.8

11.8

109.7

9.1

Solivite

5.5

6.7

20.3

10.7

Nutrigen

11.8

16.2

28.7

16.7

Average

8.7

11.7

52.9

12.2

Figure 3. The degree of reaction for the 4 cultured milk drink brands.

1187

0.8

0.6

0.6

0.4

Component 2 (8.63%)

Component 2 (6.1%)

0.4
0.2
0
-0.2
-0.4

-0.2
-0.4

-0.6

-0.6
-0.8
-2.5

0.2

-2

-1.5

-1
-0.5
0
Component 1 (92.7%)

0.5

-0.8
-1.5

1.5

Figure 4. The PCA plot using the degree of reaction.

-1

-0.5

0
0.5
Component 1 (89.6%)

1.5

Figure 5. The PCA plot using the relative reaction.

150

100

50
Component 2 (11.9%)

Component 2 (0.1%)

-2

-4

0
-50
-100
-150
-200

-6

-8
-100

-250

100

200
300
Component 1 (99.9%)

400

-300
-400

500

Figure 6. The PCA plot using the rate of reaction at the initial absorption
time.

IV.

-100
0
Component 1 (86.6%)

100

200

300

CONCLUSION
[3]

A. H. Gomez, J. Wang, G. Hu and A. G. Pereira, Discrimination of

sorage shelf life for mandarin by electronic nose technique, LWT,
vol. 40, pp 681-689, March 2006.
[4] S. Labreche, S. Bazzo, S. Cade, and E. Chanie, Shelf life
determination by electronic nose: application to milk, Sensors and
Actuators B, vol. 106, pp. 199-206, March 2005.
[5] K. Brudzewski, S. Osowski, and T. Markiewicz, Classification of
milk by means of an electronic nose and SVM neural network,
Sensors and Actuators B, vol. 98, pp. 291-298, 2004.
[6] N. El Barbri, E. Llobet, N. El Bari, X. Correig, and B. Bouchiki,
Electronic Nose based on metal oxide semiconductor sensors as an
alternative for the spoilage clasification of red meat, Sensors, vol. 8,
pp. 142-156, January 2008.
[7] A. Amari, N. El Barbri, E. Llobet, N. El Bari, X. Correig, and B.
Bouchiki, Monitoring the freshness of moroccon sardines with a
neural network based electronic nose, Sensors, vol. 6, pp. 12091223, October 2006.
[8] M. Peris, and L. E. Gilabert, A 21st century technique for food
control: electronic noses. Analytica Chimica Acta, vol. 638, pp. 115, 2009.
[9] K. Brudzewski, and J. Ulaczyk, An effective method for analysis of
dynamic electronic nose responses, Sensors and Actuators B:
Chemical, vol. 140, pp. 43-50, 2009.
[10] S. Zhang, C. Xie, D. Zeng, Q. Zhang, H. Li, and Z. Bi, A feature
extraction method and a sampling system for fast recognition of
flammable liquids with a portable E-nose, Sensors and Actuators B,
vol. 124, pp. 437-443, 2007.

REFERENCES

[2]

-200

Figure 7. The PCA plot using the accumulative total of the reaction degree
changing.

Various features can be extracted from a sensor response

curve obtained in the electronic nose measurement. The
quality of these features in terms of their repeatability and
discrimination ability to provide a standard reading must be
studied before being used in any classification or prediction
problems. This paper presented four different features
obtained from a sensor response curve. The results showed
that the degree of reaction is the best feature to represent the
odor of cultured milk drink. This feature is the most
repeatable and the best feature to discriminate the four
brands of cultured milk drink. Besides that, the results show
that the sensors exhibit different reaction rate at the initial
absorption time resulting to the instable reading of the
reaction at the initial point of absorption.

[1]

-300

S. Panigrahi, S. Balasubramaniam, H. Gu, C. M. Logue, and M.

Marchello, Design and development of a metal oxide based
electronic nose for spoilage classification of beef, Sensors and
Actuators B, vol. 119, pp. 2-14, June 2006.
A. H. Gomez, J. Wang, G. Hu and A. G. Pereira, Monitoring storage
shelf life of tomato using electronic nose technique, Journal of Food
Engineering, vol. 85, pp. 625-631, September 2007.

1188