Improving the geographical origin classification of Radix glycyrrhizae (licorice) through hyperspectral imaging assisted by U-Net fine structure recognition

(licorice) is extensively employed in traditional Chinese medicine, and serves as a crucial raw material in industries such as food and cosmetics. The quality of licorice from different origins varies greatly, so classification of its geographical origin is particularly important. This study proposes a technique for fine structure recognition and segmentation of hyperspectral images of licorice using deep learning U-Net neural networks to segment the tissue structure patterns (phloem, xylem, and pith). Firstly, the three partitions were separately labeled using the Labelme tool, which was utilized to train the U-Net model. Secondly, the obtained optimal U-Net model was applied to predict three partitions of all samples. Lastly, various machine learning models (LDA, SVM, and PLS-DA) were trained based on segmented hyperspectral data. In addition, a threshold method and a circumcircle method were applied to segment licorice hyperspectral images for comparison. The results revealed that compared with the threshold segmentation method (which yielded SVM classifier accuracies of 99.17%, 91.15%, and 92.50% on the training set, validation set, and test set, respectively), the U-Net segmentation method significantly enhanced the accuracy of origin classification (99.06%, 94.72% and 96.07%). Conversely, the circumcircle segmentation method did not effectively improve the accuracy of origin classification (99.65%, 91.16% and 92.13%). By integrating Raman imaging of licorice, it can be inferred that the U-Net model, designed for region segmentation based on the inherent tissue structure of licorice, can effectively improve the accuracy origin classification, which has positive significance in the development of intelligence and information technology of Chinese medicine quality control.