LEARNING RULES FOR ODOUR RECOGNITION IN AN ELECTRONIC NOSE

摘要

The problem of automating the sensing and classification of odours is one which promises a wide range of industrial applications. During the INTESA project, a prototype electronic nose was developed, using sensors based on novel conducting polymer materials and also more traditional MOS materials. The software component of the prototype processes the transient resistance change signals recorded by the hardware, and classifies the odour sample into one of a number of "odour classes". This paper describes two of the soft computing methods investigated for learning classification rules in this domain. The first method builds on previous work done on the Fril data browser, using clustering, fuzzy matching, Fril rules and evidential logic rules. The second method uses a fuzzy extension of the ID3 decision tree induction method, called "mass assignment tree induction (MATI)". Some of the results of applying these methods to data obtained from the INTESA prototype are presented and discussed.