Maize is among the most important economic corps in China while moisture content is a critical parameterin the process of storage and breeding. To measure the moisture content in maize kernel, a near-infrared hyperspectral imaging system has been built to acquire reflectance images from maize kernel samples in the spectral region between 1 000 and 2 500 nm. Near-infrared hyperspectral information of full surface and embryo of maize kernel were firstly extracted based on band ratio coupled with a simple thresholding method and the spectra analysis between moisture content in maize kernel and embryo was performed. The characteristic bands were then selected with the help of Competitive Adaptive Reweighted Sampling (CARS), Genetic Algorithm (GA) and Successive Projection Algorithm (SPA). Finally, these selected variables were used as the inputs to build Partial Least Square (PLS) models for determining the moisture content of maize kernel. In this study, a significant relation, which the spectral reflectance decreases as moisture content increase, between moisture content and spectral of embryo in maize kernel was observed. For the investigated independent test samples, all the proposed regression models, namely CARS-PLS, GA-PLS and SPA-PLS, achieved a good performance by using the information of embryo region. The correlation coefficient (Rp) and Root Mean Squared Error of Prediction (RMSEP) and number of characteristic wavelength for the prediction set were 0.931 2, 0.315 3, 9 and 0.917 6, 0.336 9, 14 and 0.922 7, 0.336 6, 16 for CARS-PLS, GA-PLS and SPA-PLS models, respectively. And, compared with models obtained by full surface spectral information, less characteristic wavelengths is used for development of CARS-PLS, GA-PLS and SPA-PLS models, while similar results were obtained. Comprehensively analyzing to both model accuracy and model complexity, SPA-PLS model by using embryo region information achieved the best result. Wavelengths at 1 197, 1 322 and 1 495 nm were applied to extracted the information of embryo region, and the bands at 1 322, 1 342, 1 367, 1 949, 2 070 and 2 496 nm were used to establish the SPA-PLS model. These results demonstrated that near-infrared hyperspectral information from embryo region is more effective for determination of moisture nondestructive in maize kernel.