A substance detection system having an electronic nose and classifier. The system may extract feature from the electronic signals representing the smells from the electronic nose sensing an unknown substance. The features may be formatted as smellprints that are synthesized as data. The features may be classified, and in a binary tournament fashion, as an illustrative example, may be mapped to be compared or correlated with features of known substances. The known substance or substances having the highest scores for good mapping, comparison or correlation with the sensed substance, may be reviewed in view of decision criteria to determine an identification of the sensed substance.