Protected Geographical Indication Identification of a Chinese Green Tea (Anji-White) by Near-Infrared Spectroscopy and Chemometric Class Modeling Techniques

This paper reports a rapid identification method for a Chinese green tea with PGI, Anji-white tea, by class modeling techniques and NIR spectroscopy. 167 real and representative Anji-white tea samples were collected from 8 tea plantations in their original producing areas for model training. Another 81 non-Anji-white tea samples of similar appearance were collected from 7 important tea producing areas and used for validation of model specificity. Diffuse NIR spectra were measured with finely ground tea powders. OCPLS and SIMCA were used to describe the distribution of representative Anji-white tea objects and predict the authenticity of new objects. For data preprocessing, smoothing, derivatives, and SNV were applied to improve the raw spectra and classification performance. It is demonstrated that taking derivatives and SNV can improve classification accuracy and reduce the complexity of class models by removing spectral background and baseline. For the best models, the sensitivity and specificity were 0.886 and 0.951 for OCPLS, 0.886 and 0.938 for SIMCA with SNV spectra, respectively. Although it is difficult to perform an exhaustive analysis of all types of potential false objects, the proposed method can detect most of the important non-Anji-white teas in the Chinese market.