Abstract

Most commercially available ground coffees are processed from Robusta or Arabica coffee beans. In this work, we report on the potential of Structured Laser Illumination Planar Imaging (SLIPI) technique for the classification of five types of Robusta and Arabica commercial ground coffee samples (Familial, Belier, Brazil, Colombia and Malaga). This classification is made, here, from the measurement of the extinction coefficient µ_e and of the optical depth OD by means of SLIPI. The proposed technique offers the advantage of eliminating the light intensity from photons which have been multiply scattered in the coffee solution, leading to an accurate and reliable measurement of µ_e. Data analysis uses the chemometric techniques of Principal Component Anaysis (PCA) for variable selection and Hierarchical Cluster Analysis (HCA) for classification. The chemometric model demonstrates the potential of this approach for practical assessment of coffee grades by correctly classifying the coffee samples according to their species.

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