Sesame oil produced by the traditional aqueous extraction process (TAEP) has been recognized by its pleasant flavor and high nutrition value. This paper developed a rapid and nondestructive method to predict the sesame oil yield by TAEP using near-infrared (NIR) spectroscopy. A collection of 145 sesame seed samples was measured by NIR spectroscopy and the relationship between the TAEP oil yield and the spectra was modeled by least-squares support vector machine (LS-SVM). Smoothing, taking second derivatives (D2), and standard normal variate (SNV) transformation were performed to remove the unwanted variations in the raw spectra. The results indicated that D2-LS-SVM (4000–9000 cm−1) obtained the most accurate calibration model with root mean square error of prediction (RMSEP) of 1.15 (%, w/w). Moreover, the RMSEP was not significantly influenced by different initial values of LS-SVM parameters. The calibration model could be helpful to search for sesame seeds with higher TAEP oil yields.
Near-Infrared Spectroscopy Combined with Multivariate Calibration to Predict the Yield of Sesame Oil Produced by Traditional Aqueous Extraction Process