Lasers for the Designation of Origin (PDO) and/or Protected Geographical Indication (PGI) and the detection of adulteration of Extra Virgin Olive Oil

This Mediterranean Diet post summarizes the results of a work in which Laser-Induced Breakdown Spectroscopy (LIBS) and absorption spectroscopy aided by machine learning are employed for discriminating some extra virgin Greek olive oils of different olive cultivars for the first time. LIBS and absorption spectra of ex-tra virgin olive oils belonging to Kolovi and Koroneiki cultivars, as well as mix-tures of them, were collected, analyzed, and used to develop classification schemes employing Linear Discriminant Analysis and Gradient Boosting, the latter allowing the determination of the most important spectral features. Both algorithms were found to provide efficient classification of the olive oil spectra with accuracies ex-ceeding 90%. Furthermore, for the first time, the emission spectra of LIBS were fused with the absorption spectra to create predictive models and their accuracies were found to be significantly improved. This work demonstrates the enhanced ca-pabilities of LIBS and absorption spectroscopy and the potential of their combina-tion for olive oil quality monitoring and control.