The quality of the seed is one of the major factors in a desirable cultivation. The seeds should have the germination capability and possess the physiological traits required for rapid germination and proper seedling establishment. The germination and vigor are two prominent properties of the physiological quality [
1]. Seeds can maintain their quality for a limited period of time, after which they will lose their germination ability and vigor [
2]. During storage, the physiological and physicochemical alterations in the seed structure can decrease its quality which is also known as seed aging including chemical seed deterioration [
3]. The viability of the seeds deteriorates during long-term storage due to the changes in the lipid peroxidation [
4]. Low seed viability can decrement the crop yield through two approaches: lower than expected percentage of the grown seedlings which may result in low density of the vegetation [
5] and lower growth rate and uniformity of the plants compared to those grown from the robust seeds [
6]. Therefore, determination of the highly vigorous and young seeds from the old ones has become a vital issue in modern agriculture [
7].
The traditional methods of evaluation of seed germination and aging are based on color and aroma indicators or through standard laboratory tests such as standard germination, accelerated aging test, electrical conductivity test, seedling growth test, cold test, and tetrazolium [
8,
9]. Despite their high precision, these methods are not practical on a commercial scale as they are usually non-automatic, time-consuming, and destructive and/or require specialized training and experience [
10,
11,
12]. Therefore, in recent years, researchers have been searching for non-destructive screening methods with high throughput for the seed industry to increase the yield of the product through using high-vigor seeds [
11].
Extensive advances in machine vision technology and equipment in the last decade have enhanced their ability to acquire high-resolution images. Using chemometrics techniques, it is possible to extract qualitative indicators of chemical components of agricultural products from images acquired by machine vision equipment [
13]. Machine vision tools are non-destructive as they do not have direct contact with the surface of the samples. On the other hand, they can quickly image the sample, making them suitable for monitoring agricultural products on a large scale [
14,
15]. Hyperspectral imaging (HSI) is one of the new non-destructive methods based on machine vision which combines the capabilities of spectral and digital imaging technology [
16]. This method is capable of simultaneously acquiring spectral and image information of the sample, which is the main advantage of HSI over traditional near-infrared (NIR) technology which can only collect spectral data [
17]. Therefore, the HSI system creates a "hypercube" (3D) dataset consisting of two spatial dimensions and one spectral dimension [
18]. The digital image information represents the size, shape, defects, and other external characteristics of the sample. While the spectral information simultaneously shows the difference in the internal physical structure and chemical composition of the sample [
19]. Using HSI technology, it is possible to acquire the spectrum of each pixel and the image of each band. The integration of these capabilities leads to the representation of structural features and spatial distribution of detected objects [
20]. The main disadvantage of HSI technology is the requirement of a new calibration model for each seed and cultivar, and the calibration models must be developed based on large datasets that include different orchards, seasons, cropping systems [
15]. Analyzing such large datasets by traditional analysis methods is time-consuming and somewhat imprecise; thus, researchers have recently used new artificial intelligence methods to analyze HSI data [
21]. Recently, deep learning (DL) models have gained significant popularity in the analysis of HSI data. Thanks to their high accuracy and modeling speed and the ability to analyze a large amount of data, these data have been successfully used to identify different seeds [
22,
23]. Unlike the conventional modeling paradigm, DL adopts a hierarchical structure similar to the human brain, where DL automatically learns lower-level features layer by layer to form abstract higher-level features to discover a distributed representation of data [
24]. Convolutional neural network (CNN) is a type of neural network usually used for learning visual datasets (such as images and photos). Conceptually, these networks are simple like neural networks, that is, they use feedforward and back propagation of error phases. These networks are classified in the category of deep learning due to their high number of layers [
25]. A CNN is a deep learning algorithm capable of receiving an image input. It assigns significance (learnable weights and biases) to different aspects or objects in the image to finally distinguish one from the other. The required pre-processing of a convolutional network is far less than other classification algorithms. These networks can also learn filters or features, while in the early methods, these filters were designed and engineered manually [
26]. A deep CNN model includes a limited set of processing layers that can learn different features of input data (such as an image) with multiple levels of abstraction. The initial layers learn and extract high-level features (with lower abstraction) such as image edges and noises, while deeper layers learn and extract low-level features (with higher abstraction) [
27]. The use of HSI combined with CNN has been recently investigated for the classification of different types of agricultural products, which can be mentioned as: the diagnosis of seed viability of waxy corn [
2], the possibility of identification of Sophora japonica seed viability [
4], identification of hybrid okra seeds [
21], identification of Fritillaria thunbergii cultivars [
28], identification of soybean seeds with high oil content [
29], corn seed classification [
30] and identification of sweet corn seed cultivars [
31].
In this research, two peanut cultivars were selected and three levels of artificial aging were induced to them. The HSI data of the samples were obtained and the viability of the seeds was evaluated using two pre-trained CNN image processing models: AlexNet and VGGNet. The classification results of CNN models were also compared with traditional machine learning models of support vector machine (SVM) and linear discriminant analysis (LDA) based on reflection spectra.