Determination of Marinated Fish Freshness Using Near-Infrared Spectroscopy

Fish is a highly nutritious and widely consumed food in Taiwan, however, its high moisture content and biological composition make it extremely perishable, requiring proper handling during storage and distribution process in order to avoid spoilage and quality deterioration. This work utilized near-infrared spectroscopy as a rapid, efficient, and non-destructive method to discriminate non-marinated, lime-marinated, and garlic-marinated Tilapia fillets based on the volatile nitrogen limit. Soft Independent modelling of Class Analogy (SIMCA) and Partial Least Squares Discriminant Analysis (PLS-DA) were employed to train the classification model using preprocessed spectra. PLS-DA gave superior predictive performance in predicting the samples, achieving 91.3% accuracy, 100% specificity, and 87.5% sensitivity, demonstrating
that Near-Infrared Spectroscopy can be utilized to evaluate marinated Tilapia fish freshness and put a label based on the TVBN values between acceptable class for a value below 15 mg/100 g and non-acceptable class for a value above 15 mg/100 g which indicate a spoilaging process.