Abstract
There is no work on taste recognition of optical response patterns from multi-channel optical fiber sensors, although electrode taste sensors using lipid/polymer coatings have been already used. This paper proposes a new taste recognition system using optical response patterns from multi-channel optical fiber sensors having potential sensitive dye coatings. The sensors have been found to give large changes in optical absorption spectra of the dyes when they are immersed in various taste solutions. This results shows that they can be used as a taste sensor. Six dyes, which give large changes in dye absorption, have been selected from twenty dyes and used for six-channel optical fiber taste sensors array. The absorption spectra change data have been processed by multiple discriminant analysis and neural networks using back-propagation algorithm. The analytical results shows that salty(NaCI), bitter(quinidine), sweet(sucrose), sour(HCI), and umami(MSG) substances can be recognized from each other by using the optical taste sensor system.
