This article explore the feasibility of using Near Infrared Reflectance (NIR) and Transmittance (NIT) Spectroscopy (908.1-1677.2 nm wavelength range) to identify maize hybrid purity, and compare the performance of NIR and NIT spectroscopy. Principle Component Analysis (PCA) and Orthogonal Linear Discriminant Analysis (OLDA) were used to reduce the dimension of spectra which have been pretreated by first derivative and vector normalization. The hybrid purity identification model of Nonghua101 and Jingyu16 were built by SVM. Models based on NIR spectra obtained correct identification rate as 100% and 90% for Nonghua101 and Jingyu16 respectively. But NIR spectra were greatly influenced by the placement of seeds, and there existed significant difference between NIR spectra of embryo and non-embryo side. Models based on NIT spectroscopy yielded correct identification rate as 98% both for Nonghua101 and Jingyu16. NIT spectra of embryo and non-embryo side were highly similar. The results indicate that it is feasible to identify maize hybrid purity based on NIR and NIT spectroscopy, and NIT spectroscopy is more suitable to analyze single seed kernel than NIR spectroscopy.