Patent ID: 6411905
Filing Date: 2002-06-25
Classification: G01N

Abstract:
A method for obtaining an estimate of the concentration of an odor in an air sample from data obtained by evaluating the sample with a sensor-array type electronic nose, the method comprising:processing a set of air sample data including sensor-array data obtained from evaluating the air sample with the sensor-array type electronic nose and measurements of the humidity of the air sample and clean reference air used by the electronic nose to reduce noise in the air sample data and to decrease the dimensionality of that set of data to a predetermined number of dimensions, thereby obtaining a set of the predetermined number of air sample components; and applying a non-linear transformation to the set of air sample components to obtain as output an estimate of the concentration of the odor in the air sample, the non-linear transformation using parameters obtained by: using an olfactometer to obtain discrete measurements of odor concentration from each of a plurality of calibration samples of air containing the odor, using the sensor-array type electronic nose to obtain a discrete set of calibration data from each of the calibration samples, each set including sensor-array data and measurements of the humidity of the calibration sample and the clean reference air used by the electronic nose, processing each set of calibration data to reduce noise in the air sample data and to decrease the dimensionality of that set of data to a predetermined number of dimensions, thereby obtaining a discrete set of the predetermined number of calibration components, and applying a non-linear regression to the sets of calibration components as input data and the corresponding measured odor concentrations as expected output to obtain the parameters of a non-linear transformation.