Prediction of Water Chemical Oxygen Demand with Multi-Scale One-Dimensional Convolutional Neural Network Fusion and Ultraviolet–Visible Spectroscopy

Chemical oxygen demand (COD) is a critical parameter employed to assess the level of organic pollution in water. Accurate COD detection is essential for effective environmental monitoring and water quality assessment. Ultraviolet-visible (UV-Vis) spectroscopy has become a widely applied method for COD detection due to its convenience and the absence of the need for chemical reagents. This non-destructive and reagent-free approach offers a rapid and reliable means of analyzing water. Recently, deep learning has emerged as a powerful tool for automating the process of spectral feature extraction and improving COD prediction accuracy. In this paper, we propose a novel multi-scale one-dimensional convolutional neural network (MS-1D-CNN) fusion model designed specifically for spectral feature extraction and COD prediction. The architecture of the proposed model involves inputting raw UV-Vis spectra into three parallel sub-1D-CNNs, which independently process the data. The outputs from the final convolution and pooling layers of each sub-CNN are then fused into a single layer, capturing a rich set of spectral features. This fused output is subsequently passed through a Flatten layer followed by fully connected layers to predict the COD value. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method, as it was compared with three traditional methods and three deep learning methods on the same dataset. The MS-1D-CNN model showed a significant improvement in the accuracy of COD prediction, highlighting its potential for more reliable and efficient water quality monitoring.