Forming Odour Categories Using an Electronic Nose

The ability to use linguistic concepts to describe perceptions of measured data is an emerging feature for artificial sensing systems. In this work, we address the problem of symbolically representing odour categories using the data from an electronic nose. One objective is to facilitate human and computer interaction and therefore, the names given to the odours are coorelated with a human user. Perceptual differences that arise between the human perception of odours and the electronic one, represent a challenge to the system. Therefore, to cope with these differences, the system maintains the freedom to evaluate how appropriately the linguistic concepts represent the sensory perceptions. Finally, some experimental results are shown where the odour categories are formed and new odours are described using these categories.