The investigation of visible and near infrared hyperspectral imaging (400-1000 nm) coupled with classifiers and spectral pre-processing techniques was conducted to discriminate fresh from cold-stored (4 degrees C for 7 days) and frozen-thawed (-20 degrees C and 40 degrees C for 30 days) grass carp fish fillets. Four classifiers with four spectral pretreatment methods were applied to establish the classification models. Compared with the original models established using the full wavelengths, the classification models with three classifiers of soft independent modeling of class analogy (SIMCA), least squares-support vector machine (LS-SVM) and probabilistic neural network (PNN) in tandem with the first derivative pretreatment showed the best classification performance and the highest correct classification rate (CCR) of 94.29%. In addition, in order to reduce the high dimensionality of hyperspectral images, seven optimal wavelengths were selected by successive projections algorithm (SPA) and used to simplify the classification models. The simplified model obtained by the LS-SVM classifier coupled with the first derivative pre-processing method also presented good prediction accuracy with the CCR of 91.43%. The results demonstrated that the integration of hyperspectral imaging and classifiers analysis had a great potential for on-line detection and was feasible to rapidly and non-invasively discriminate fresh and frozen-thawed fish fillets. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.