Nondestructive evaluation of seed viability is one of the highly demanding technologies for seed production industry. Conventional seed sorting technologies, such as tetrazolium and standard germination test are destructive, time consuming, and labor intensive methods. Near infrared spectroscopy technique has shown good potential for nondestructive quality measurements for food and agricultural products. In this study, FT-NIR spectroscopy was used to classify normal and artificially aged lettuce seeds. The spectra with the range of 1100~2500 nm were scanned for lettuce seeds and analyzed using the principal component analysis(PCA) method. To classify viable seeds from nonviable seeds, a calibration modeling set was developed with a partial least square(PLS) method. The calibration model developed from PLS resulted in 98% classification accuracy with the Savitzky-Golay $1^{st}$ derivative preprocessing method. The prediction accuracy for the test data set was 93% with the MSC(Multiplicative Scatter Correction) preprocessing method. The results show that FT-NIR has good potential for discriminating non-viable lettuce seeds from viable ones.