Linking Tea Aroma Chemistry to Quality Grades via a Single MOS Gas Sensor: Classical Machine Learning vs. Deep Learning
SENSORS, cilt.26, sa.12, 2026 (SCI-Expanded, Scopus)
- Yayın Türü: Makale / Tam Makale
- Cilt numarası: 26 Sayı: 12
- Basım Tarihi: 2026
- Doi Numarası: 10.3390/s26123877
- Dergi Adı: SENSORS
- Derginin Tarandığı İndeksler: Science Citation Index Expanded (SCI-EXPANDED), Scopus, Compendex, EMBASE, INSPEC, MEDLINE, Directory of Open Access Journals, Academic Search Ultimate (EBSCO), Biomedical Reference Collection: Corporate Edition (EBSCO), Health Research Premium Collection (ProQuest)
- Recep Tayyip Erdoğan Üniversitesi Adresli: Evet
Özet
Highlights What are the main findings? A single low-cost MOS gas sensor can discriminate three commercial black tea quality grades. A raw-waveform deep model (MS-CNN-Attention) reached F1-macro 0.811, a 30% gain over the best classical classifier (0.624), and graded 14 of 16 products correctly by majority vote (11 of 16 for the MLP). What are the implications of the main findings? The instrument offers a fast, non-destructive complement to sensory-panel tea grading. Raw-waveform modeling helps most for the medium grade (F1: 0.52 -> 0.79), where summary statistics discard the release kinetics.Highlights What are the main findings? A single low-cost MOS gas sensor can discriminate three commercial black tea quality grades. A raw-waveform deep model (MS-CNN-Attention) reached F1-macro 0.811, a 30% gain over the best classical classifier (0.624), and graded 14 of 16 products correctly by majority vote (11 of 16 for the MLP). What are the implications of the main findings? The instrument offers a fast, non-destructive complement to sensory-panel tea grading. Raw-waveform modeling helps most for the medium grade (F1: 0.52 -> 0.79), where summary statistics discard the release kinetics.Abstract Black tea quality is governed by aroma chemistry: terpene alcohols (linalool, geraniol, nerolidol), methyl salicylate, and short-chain aldehydes whose abundance and release kinetics from the polyphenol-rich leaf matrix shape perceived grade. Grade information lies not only in the average headspace concentration but in the temporal shape of volatile organic compound (VOC) release under controlled heating. Conventional electronic noses obscure this signal: they rely on multi-sensor arrays, compress each response into summary statistics, and report accuracy only at the level of individual measurements. Whether a single low-cost metal-oxide-semiconductor (MOS) gas sensor can recover grade-defining aroma chemistry, and whether waveform-level modeling can exploit it, was therefore investigated. A portable electronic nose built around a Bosch BME688 sensor recorded 90 time series, each comprising four directly measured channels (temperature, humidity, pressure, gas sensor resistance) and a derived indoor-air-quality (IAQ) proxy computed from them by the on-chip BSEC library, from 16 commercial Turkish black teas across three quality grades. Two representations were compared on the same data: a feature-based pipeline reducing 25 statistical descriptors to seven principal components for six classifiers (best F1-macro = 0.624, MLP), and a raw-waveform Multi-Scale 1D-CNN with Squeeze-Excitation and temporal self-attention (MS-CNN-Attention). Under product-grouped cross-validation, the deep model reached F1-macro = 0.811 (+30%) and graded 14 of 16 products correctly by majority vote, against 11 of 16 for the MLP, with the largest gain in the medium grade (F1: 0.52 -> 0.79), where summary-statistic compression destroys the release-kinetic signal. The contributions are threefold: one programmable MOS sensor operated as a thermal-desorption profiler rather than a sensor array; a direct comparison of feature-based classical learning against raw-waveform deep learning on the same small, non-normally distributed dataset; and a product-level decision-consistency metric suited to batch screening. Pairing a low-cost MOS sensor with waveform-level modeling offers a rapid, non-destructive route to aroma-chemistry-based tea quality screening.