Cultivar Discrimination of Single Alfalfa ( Medicago sativa L.) Seed via Multispectral Imaging Combined with Multivariate Analysis.

Rapid and accurate discrimination of alfalfa cultivars is crucial for producers, consumers, and market regulators. However, the conventional routine of alfalfa cultivars discrimination is time-consuming and labor-intensive. In this study, the potential of a new method was evaluated that used multispectral imaging combined with object-wise multivariate image analysis to distinguish alfalfa cultivars with a single seed. Three multivariate analysis methods including principal component analysis (PCA), linear discrimination analysis (LDA), and support vector machines (SVM) were applied to distinguish seeds of 12 alfalfa cultivars based on their morphological and spectral traits. The results showed that the combination of morphological features and spectral data could provide an exceedingly concise process to classify alfalfa seeds of different cultivars with multivariate analysis, while it failed to make the classification with only seed morphological features. Seed classification accuracy of the testing sets was 91.53% for LDA, and 93.47% for SVM. Thus, multispectral imaging combined with multivariate analysis could provide a simple, robust and nondestructive method to distinguish alfalfa seed cultivars.