Classification of saline water for irrigated agriculture using near infrared spectroscopy coupled with pattern recognition techniques

This research aimed to create near infrared (NIR) spectroscopy models for the classification of saline water with a pattern recognition technique. A total of 112 water samples were collected from the Tha Chin river basin in Thailand. Water samples with salinity less than 0.2 g/l were identified as suitable for agriculture, while water samples with salinity higher than 0.2 g/l were found to be unsuitable. The NIR spectra of water samples were recorded using a Fourier transform (FT) NIR spectrometer in the wavenumber of 12,500–4,000 cm-1. The salinity of each water sample was analysed by electrical conductivity meter. Identification models were established with 5 supervised pattern recognition techniques including k-nearest neighbour (k-NN), support vector machine (SVM), artificial neural network (ANN), soft independent modelling of class analogies (SIMCA), and partial least squares-discriminant analysis (PLS-DA). The performance of the NIR model was carried out with a split-test method. About 80% of spectra (90 spectra) were randomly selected to develop the classification models. After model development, the NIR spectroscopy models were used to classify the categories of the remaining samples (22 samples). The ANN model showed the highest performance for classifying saline water with precision, recall, F-measure and accuracy of 84.6%, 100.0%, 91.7% and 90.9%, respectively. Other techniques presented satisfactory classification results with accuracy greater than 68.2%. This point indicated that NIR spectroscopy coupled with the pattern recognition technique could be applied to classify saline water for agricultural use according to salinity level in natural resources.