The feasibility of rapid analysis of glucose and fructose in lotus root powder by Fourier transform near-infrared (FT-NIR) spectroscopy was studied. Diffuse reflectance spectra were collected between 4000 and 12,432 cm(-1). Calibration models established by partial least-squares regression (PLSR), interval PLS of forward (FiPLS) and backward (BiPLS), back propagation-artificial neural networks (BP-ANN) and least squares-support vector machine (LS-SVM) were compared. The optimal models for glucose and fructose were obtained by LS-SVM with the first 10 latent variables (LVs) as input. For fructose the correlation coefficients of calibration (r(c)) and prediction (r(p)), the root-mean-square errors of calibration (RMSEC) and prediction (RMSEP), and the residual predictive deviation (RPD) were 0.9827, 0.9765, 0.107%, 0.115% and 4.599, respectively. For glucose the indexes were 0.9243, 0.8286, 0.543%, 0.812% and 1.785. The results indicate that NIR spectroscopy technique with LS-SVM offers effective quantitative capability for glucose and fructose in lotus root powder. (C) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.