Hybrid tuliptree (Liriodendron sion-americanum P.C. Yieh ex Shang et Z.R. Wang) is a hybrid species obtained by crossbreeding Chinese tuliptree (Liriodendron chinese Sarg.) and tuliptree (Liriodendron tulipifera L.). Compared with parental species, hybrid tuliptree displayed faster growth rate and wider adaptability, and it can be used to make furniture, toys, plywood, and pulp. According to LY/T 2054 − 2012 “Methods for evaluating machining properties of lumber”, the hybrid tuliptree wood had good performances in sanding, planning, milling, lathing and tenoning(Ge et al., 2019a). In addition to the compressive strength, the other physical properties of hybrid tuliptree was superior to its parents(Ge et al., 2019b).
However, the morphological properties of hybrid tuliptree, Chinese tuliptree, and tuliptree are highly similar, it is difficult to distinguish the three woods by structural characteristics. Since hybrid tuliptree offers obvious advantages for wood quality and growth speed, timber traders often use Chinese tuliptree as hybrid tuliptree for profiteering(Ge et al., 2019b). There was no regulatory authority in China can provide reliable methods for hybrid tuliptree wood identification, which may lead to consumer rights abuses.
To maintain the order of the timber market and the interests of consumers, it is necessary to establish a fast and reliable method for hybrid tuliptree identification. Traditional wood identification methods were mainly carried out by the perspective of physics and anatomy. Despite the effectiveness of these methods, it has intrinsic disadvantages of low accuracy, high cost, and lack of speed(Ravindran et al., 2020). By contrast, optical and chemotaxonomical methods had proven useful in wood identification(Brunswick et al., 2021), extremely similar wood species can be distinguished by analyze the spectral characteristics.
To our knowledge, near-infrared spectroscopy (NIR) is an efficient, high-speed, non-destructive technology and have been widely used in analyzing woody materials(Dalmolin Ciarnoschi et al., 2022). Near infrared hyperspectral imaging (NIR-HSI) combines spectroscopy and imaging, enabling the acquisition of the entire spectrum at various locations in the image plane. Compared to NIR, NIR-HSI can be better detect the optical characteristic of samples, which enables both morphological and compositional inspection. Therefore, this technology is more suitable for the analysis of heterogeneous samples and allows more reliable qualitative identification using both spectral and spatial information(Xue et al., 2022).
NIR-HSI has proved to be a reliable method to analyze soils, water, food, seeds, and other samples(Tigabu and Odén, 2003, Tigabu and Odén, 2004, McLean et al., 2014, da Conceicao et al., 2021, Piarulli et al., 2021, Zhang et al., 2021, Zhao et al., 2021). Little research has focus on the analysis of highly similar materials, such as wood products taken from relative species. It is worthwhile to establish an effective method to identify highly similar woods, considering that NIR-HSI has more advantages than NIR spectroscopy.
In this study, cube wood samples of hybrid tuliptree, Chinese tuliptree and tuliptree were analyzed by NIR-HSI spectroscopy technique with SG (Savitzky-Golay) smoothing, SNV (Standard Normal Variate), Normalize, MSC (Multiple scattering correction), and successive projections algorithm (SPA) pre-processing methods, aims to establish a reliable approach for the classification of the species from the genus Liriodendron. Meanwhile, this study also evaluated the potential application of this technique to the analysis of highly similar materials.