Odor Evaluation of Vehicle Interior Materials Based on Portable E-nose

The evaluation of the odor emitted by the interior materials is of great significance to the air quality control in the vehicle. This paper focuses on the multi-label classification problem of the odor type (i.e. the type of material from which the odor is released) and the grade evaluation in the vehicle. Two multi-label classifiers based on binary relevance (BR) and classification chain (CC) were designed to distinguish odor types and grades simultaneously and to distinguish odor types first and then grades, respectively. Based on the self-designed portable E-nose, six grades of odors released from six types of common interior materials were detected and classified. Experimental results showed that both the multi-label classifiers achieved better recognition accuracy, but the CC had an average recognition rate of 88.17% slightly better than the BR. It is preliminarily verified that the portable E-nose based multi-label classifiers could be used to evaluate the odor of automotive interior materials.