Robust Odor Detection in Electronic Nose Using Transfer-Learning Powered Scentformer Model

Mimicking the olfactory system of humans, the use of electronic noses (E-noses) for the detection of odors in nature has become a hot research topic. This study presents a novel E-nose based on deep learning architecture called Scentformer, which addresses the limitations of the current E-nose like a narrow detection range and limited generalizability across different scenarios. Armed with a self-adaptive data down-sampling method, the E-nose is capable of detecting 55 different natural odors with the classification accuracy of 99.94%, and the model embedded in the E-nose is analyzed using Shapley Additive exPlanations analysis, providing a quantitative interpretation of the E-nose performance. Furthermore, leveraging Scentformer’s transfer learning ability, the E-nose efficiently adapts to new odors and gases. Rather than retraining all layers of the model on the new odor data set, only the fully connected layers need to be trained for the pretrained model. Using only 1‰ data of the retrained model, the pretrained model-based E-nose can also achieve classification accuracies of 99.14% across various odor and gas concentrations. This provides a robust approach to the detection of diverse direct current signals in real-world applications.