Waveguide-Based Microwave S-Parameter Measurements for Machine Learning-Assisted Classification of Paprika Powder Adulterants

Detecting food adulteration in powdered spices through visual inspection is difficult, and paprika powder is particularly susceptible to adulteration due to its fine particulate structure and intense color. This study proposes a waveguide-based microwave S-parameter measurement approach combined with machine learning for the classification of organic and mineral adulterants in paprika powder. The experimental dataset was created by intentionally adulterating a commercial paprika brand with five organic and five mineral materials in varying proportions. The S11 and S21 scattering parameters, measured in the 3.3-4.9 GHz frequency range, of these samples, comprising a total of 11 different classes including pure paprika, were used as input in the machine learning-based classification process. The proposed framework directly uses frequency and S11 and S21 responses to distinguish pure paprika from ten adulterant types without complex feature extraction. S-parameter measurements were performed iteratively for each condition using a vector network analyzer, and the average values were used in the analyses. The frequency-point-level performance of the model was examined with different training/test data splitting ratios during the classification process. Furthermore, 10-fold cross-validation was performed during the training phase, and the performance of different classifiers was evaluated comparatively using overall and balanced validation and test accuracies. Under random point-wise partitioning, Subspace KNN achieved the highest numerical performance, with a mean frequency-point-level test accuracy of 99.86±0.06% across 10 independent runs. The findings demonstrate the frequency-point-level separability of microwave S-parameter responses under the investigated experimental conditions.