Relationship between surface microstructure characteristics and appearance quality of flue-cured tobacco leaves

To clarify the factors affecting the appearance quality of flue-cured tobacco leaves and further to develop an objective and quantitative method of evaluating the appearance quality, taking tobacco leaves from Henan and Yunnan as samples, the relationship between the surface microstructure characteristic indexes (cell area, cell perimeter, cell shape, cell density and stomatal density) and appearance quality was studied with scanning electron microscope and image processing software, and a prediction model of appearance quality based on surface microstructure characteristic indexes was established. The results showed that: 1) For the leaf samples from the same growing area and stalk position, cell shape changed irregularly along with the increase of maturity; leaves with open structure had smaller cell size; stomatal density decreased with leaf body of slightly thinner to moderate, leaves with moderate body was relatively regular in cell shape; oily leaves has smaller cell size and larger cell density. 2) Taking cell area, cell perimeter and cell shape as variables, a model for predicting the state of maturity and structure of tobacco leaves was established, and the average relative errors between the predicted values and evaluated values were 3.18% and 6.20% for modeling samples and validation samples, respectively. ©, 2015, Editorial Office of Tobacco Science and Technology. All right reserved.