TransCNN: a hybrid deep learning model for detecting honey adulteration by LED-induced fluorescence spectroscopy

Abstract

In recent years, honey products have faced increasing issues of adulteration, posing significant challenges to their authenticity and quality. LED-induced fluorescence (LED-IF) has the characteristics of being non-destructive, rapid and efficient, offering significant advantages in detecting honey adulteration. A hybrid architecture integrating a transformer module and CNN (TransCNN) is proposed in this paper for processing spectroscopic fluorescence data. For honey adulteration detection tasks, a lightweight transformer module is introduced before the fully connected layer of a convolutional neural network, leveraging multi-head self-attention to enhance global feature modeling capabilities in spectroscopic fluorescence data. The TransCNN model demonstrated the best performance, with an average accuracy of 98.75% and a root mean square error (RMSE) of 3.91% to 4.33%, outperforming the traditional CNN (93.25% and 5.54% to 6.24%) and SVM (88.5% and 8.07% to 9.88%). This study demonstrates that the proposed TransCNN framework provides an effective analytical strategy for modeling long-range spectral dependencies in fluorescence-based detection.

Graphical abstract: TransCNN: a hybrid deep learning model for detecting honey adulteration by LED-induced fluorescence spectroscopy

Transparent peer review

To support increased transparency, we offer authors the option to publish the peer review history alongside their article.

View this article’s peer review history

Article information

Article type
Paper
Submitted
05 Dec 2025
Accepted
06 Mar 2026
First published
19 Mar 2026

Anal. Methods, 2026, Advance Article

TransCNN: a hybrid deep learning model for detecting honey adulteration by LED-induced fluorescence spectroscopy

Z. Liu, L. Sun, X. Meng, L. Li and L. Wang, Anal. Methods, 2026, Advance Article , DOI: 10.1039/D5AY02014J

To request permission to reproduce material from this article, please go to the Copyright Clearance Center request page.

If you are an author contributing to an RSC publication, you do not need to request permission provided correct acknowledgement is given.

If you are the author of this article, you do not need to request permission to reproduce figures and diagrams provided correct acknowledgement is given. If you want to reproduce the whole article in a third-party publication (excluding your thesis/dissertation for which permission is not required) please go to the Copyright Clearance Center request page.

Read more about how to correctly acknowledge RSC content.

Social activity

Spotlight

Advertisements