ABSTRACT
Among the potential application areas for electronic noses, the monitoring of our environment constitutes a real challenge. The rigorous experimental conditions which apply in the laboratory are no longer usable in the field. Particularly, the input odour can't be considered as a well-defined variation of the gaseous ambience with respect to clean air. "In the field of environmental monitoring, the background is an ever-changing chemical mixture against which we want to detect the rise of a particular odour - although the exact profile of that rise is both unknown and variable" (Gardner and Bartlett, 1999).
