Improvement of odor approximation using mass spectrometry

Odor approximation is a technique to create a scent similar to a target one by blending multiple odor components. This technique expands the range of odor to be presented even if the number of odor components is limited. This is a key technology both for odor reproduction using odor recorder and for olfactory display. Since a set of odor components that can cover a wide range of smells has not been revealed yet, we have studied a selection of odor components using an essential-oil and food-flavor mass spectrum database. Basis vectors were extracted using the nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF) method, and then the non-negative least-squares method was used to determine the recipe. In order to increase the approximation accuracy, the method to set appropriate initial values of basis vectors in the NMF method using clustering method was proposed. The accuracy of the odor approximation was raised after the improvement.