Classification of South American Camelid and goat fiber samples based on fourier transform infrared spectroscopy and machine learning

Some animal fibers are considerably cheaper than others. Hence the existence of counterfeit products, which are detrimental to legitimate producers and consumers alike. Fourier-Transform Infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy can extract a characteristic waveform from fibers that can be later used for classification. However, visually inspecting such waveforms is imprecise. Previous research has complemented FTIR with other mathematical or physical methods to improve accuracy. In parallel, Artificial Intelligence (AI) is an emerging field that could be helpful in this domain. The objective of this work is therefore to develop and validate two machine learning models, namely, Deep Neural Networks (DNN) and Support Vector Machine (SVM) to classify spectra of fibers by species. The spectra are acquired using an FTIR spectrometer in Attenuated Total Reflectance (ATR) mode (FTIR-ATR). Camelid (alpaca: n = 51, llama: n = 50, vicuña: n = 50) and goat (mohair: n = 35 and cashmere: n = 20) samples were evaluated, from which 1236 FTIR-ATR spectra were obtained. Some visual differences were observed between the spectra of the different species. Accuracies up to 96.75% and 95.12% were obtained when evaluating the DNN and SVM models. Furthermore, an accuracy of 97.8% was obtained when evaluating the FTIR-ATR spectra of South American Camelids (SAC) fibers with DNN, and 97.2% when evaluating them with SVM. A 100% accuracy was obtained when evaluating the FTIR-ATR spectra of vicuña fibers with both models. No significant differences were found (p-value = 0.368) by comparing the number of hits against the total number of alpaca, llama, vicuña, mohair and cashmere fibers using DNN. As per the results, it seems that DNN is more accurate than SVM. In conclusion, FTIR-ATR spectrometry techniques combined with machine learning models are a reliable alternative for the identification of SAC and goats through the spectrum of their fibers.