IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INDUSTRIAL ELECTRONICS, VOL. 53, NO. 1, FEBRUARY2006 313
A Fuzzy-Similarity-Based Self-Organized
Network Inspired by Immune Algorithm for
Three-Mixture-Fragrance Recognition
Muhammad Rahmat Widyanto, Student Member, IEEE, Benyamin Kusumoputro, Hajime Nobuhara, Member,IEEE,
Kazuhiko Kawamoto, and Kaoru Hirota, Member,IEEE
Abstract—A fuzzy-similarity-based self-organized network in-
spired by immune algorithm (F-SONIA) is proposed in order
to develop an artificial odor discrimination system for three-
mixture-fragrance recognition. It can deal with an uncertainty in
frequency measurements, which is inherent in odor acquisition
devices, by employing a fuzzy similarity. Mathematical analysis
shows that the use of the fuzzy similarity results on a higher
dissimilarity between fragrance classes, therefore, the recognition
accuracy is improved and the learning time is reduced. Exper-
iments show that F-SONIA improves recognition accuracy of
SONIA by 3%–9% and the previously developed artificial odor
discrimination system by 14%–25%. In addition, the learning time
of F-SONIA is three times faster than that of SONIA.
Index Terms—Artificial odor discrimination, fuzzy similar-
ity, immune algorithm, self-organized network, three-mixture-
fragrance problem.
I. I NTRODUCTION
O
DOR discrimination is required to control the qualities
in a variety of industrial fields, e.g., food and beverage
industries, cosmetics and perfume industries. Conventionally,
odors are discriminated by trained persons based on their
human sensory system. The human sensory is, however, un-
avoidably affected by the state of the health and the mood of the
inspector, resulting in discrepancies among them. Accordingly,
an artificial odor discrimination system [1] has been developed
to replace the human sensory system.
The artificial odor discrimination system shows a high-
recognition accuracy to classify pure fragrances as well as
two-mixture fragrances [1], but the recognition accuracy for
three-mixture fragrances is a subject to improve due to a higher
problem complexity. To improve the recognition accuracy for
three-mixture fragrances, the backpropagation (BP)-based self-
organized network inspired by immune algorithm (SONIA)
[2], [3] is used as pattern classifier. SONIA cannot, however,
deal with an uncertainty in frequency measurements during
odor data acquisition. This makes the learning convergence
Manuscript received October 30, 2003; revised December 30, 2004. Abstract
published on the Internet November 25, 2005.
M. R. Widyanto, H. Nobuhara, K. Kawamoto, and K. Hirota are with the
Department of Computational Intelligence and Systems Science, Tokyo
Institute of Technology, Yokohama 226-8502, Japan (e-mail: widyanto@
hrt.dis.titech.ac.jp).
B. Kusumoputro is with the Faculty of Computer Science, University of
Indonesia, Depok 16424, Indonesia.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TIE.2005.862212
of SONIA is slow, and it cannot reach the optimum recog-
nition accuracy.
To further improve the capability of SONIA, the use of
a fuzzy similarity [4] instead of the Euclidean distance is
proposed. The proposed method is called fuzzy-similarity-
based self-organized network inspired by immune algorithm
(F-SONIA). The minimum, the mean, and the maximum val-
ues of fragrance data acquisition are used to form triangular
fuzzy numbers. Then, the fuzzy similarity measure is used to
define the relationship between fragrance inputs and connection
strengths of hidden units. The fuzzy similarity is defined as the
maximum value of the intersection region between triangular
fuzzy sets of input vectors and the connection strengths of
hidden units. The use of the fuzzy similarity results on a higher
dissimilarity between fragrance classes, therefore, the recogni-
tion accuracy is improved and the learning time is reduced. Ex-
periments on three data sets of three-mixture vegetal fragrances
show that F-SONIA improves the recognition accuracy of
SONIA by 3%–9%. In addition, the learning time of F-SONIA
is three times faster than that of SONIA. Compared to the
previously developed artificial odor discrimination system that
used fuzzy learning vector quantization (FLVQ) [5] as pattern
classifier, the recognition accuracy is increased by 14%–25%.
In Section II, the scheme of the artificial odor discrimination
system is mentioned. The F-SONIA is proposed in Section III.
Experimental results on the three-mixture-fragrance problem
are shown in Section IV. A mathematical analysis of F-SONIA
and its comparison with SONIA are summarized in Section V.
II. ARTIFICIAL ODOR DISCRIMINATION SYSTEM
The artificial odor discrimination system consists of three
subsystems, i.e., a sensory system, a frequency counter system,
and a neural network as a pattern classifier system. The sensory
system and the frequency counter system are used to measure
frequency changes during data acquisition, and the pattern
classifier system is used to discriminate odor characteristics
obtained by the other systems. Fig. 1 shows a diagram of the
artificial odor discrimination system.
The sensory system used is quartz-resonator crystals that
are constructed by sensitive thin chemical membranes. When
odorant molecules are absorbed onto the membranes, the reso-
nance frequency of the crystals will decrease significantly and
return to the normal resonance frequency after the deabsorption
process. The change of the frequency is proportional to the
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