Taste Recognizer by Multi Sensor Electronic Tongue: A Case Study with Tea Quality Classification

The present work deals with the development of electronic tongue (E-Tongue) and its application in determining the briskness of the black tea liquor. The parameters that determine the qualities of black tea are briskness of tea liquor, flavor, aroma and color. Human experts called "tea taster" usually evaluate the tea quality, and conventionally assign scores on a scale of 1 to 10, depending on the major quality attributes of the tea samples. A virtual instrumentation based E-Tongue has been described using voltammetry technique for correlating the briskness of tea liquor with the "tea taster" score. In this work an array of selected electrodes were immersed into black tea liquor-samples for analyzing the tea samples and computational model has been developed to correlate the measurements with the tea taster's briskness scores. With unknown tea samples, encouraging results have been obtained with more than 85% classification rate.