Evaluation of Data Mining Strategies for Classification of Black Tea Based on Image-Based Features

In this study, a new procedure based on computer vision was developed for qualitative classification of black tea. Images of 240 samples from four different classes of black tea, including Orange Pekoe (OP), Flowery Orange Pekoe (FOP), Flowery Broken Orange Pekoe (FBOP), and Pekoe Dust One (PD-ONE), were acquired and processed using a computer vision system. Eighteen color features, 13 gray-image texture features, and 52 wavelet texture features were extracted and assessed. Two common heuristic feature selection methods: correlation-based feature selection (CFS) and principal component analysis (PCA), were used for selecting the most significant features. Seven of the primary features were selected by CFS as the most relevant ones, while PCA converted the original variables into 11 independent components. These final discriminatory vectors were evaluated by using four different classification methods including decision tree (DT), support vector machine (SVM), Bayesian network (BN), and artificial neural networks (ANN) to predict the qualitative category of tea samples. Among the studied classifiers, the ANN with 7–10–4 topology developed by CFS-selected features provided the best classifier with a classification rate of 96.25%. The other methods assayed provided slightly lower accuracies than ANN from 86.25% for BN till 87.50% for SVM and 88.75% for DT. In all the cases, the accuracy of the classifiers increased when using the CFS-selected features as input variables in front of PCA obtained ones. It can be concluded that image-based features are strong characterizing factors which can be effectively applied for tea quality evaluation.