Existing Automated Foreign Body-detection Systems in the Food Industry

When someone takes a bite of a chicken filet sandwich, the last thing he or she wants to do is to bite down a piece of bone in the meat. That is also the last thing the food industry wants. Because there is an increase of demand for larger sortments of food products there was a need for automation of the processes involved in the preparation of the meat, fish or other food products. Using this kind of automation systems for processing the food, a higher production capacity is obtained than using manual prelucration of the food products. One of the most important processes is de debonning one. Many fast and automated systems have been developed and are being used in the food industry to separate the meat and bones During the automated meat processing stage, foreign bodies can remain in the meat. At a later stage the meat has to be inspected and the foreign bodies removed. With the deboning process there is the same problem. The speed with which the meat is deboned is direct proportional with the amount of fragments of bones remained after the process. There is a trade-off between minimal meat wastage and high rejection of bone-contaminated meat. That is why the inspection stage of processed meat is very important. The meat contaminated with bones has to be rejected and then prelucrated again. The detection of bones has to be reliable and cost efficient (because if the meat is rejected and it is not actually bone-contaminated, it is sent again for deboning and that increases the production costs-this is called a " false positive "). Further-processing facilities have spent a great deal of time and effort trying to find accurate affordable ways to screen deboned poultry products or any other meat products for any missed bone. Currently, most processing plants have employees who feel each piece of meat by hand for missed bone. Unfortunately, this method is not very accurate. This method still allows the tiniest pieces of bone or foreign bodies to slip by. Many systems have been proposed and some of them are even used for detection of foreign bodies or contaminants such as bones, mineral stones, natural rubber, ferrous or non-ferrous metals, glass, etc. in the food industry. The majority of those systems uses some kind of irradiation of the meat and deduces from the intensity of the radiation whether there is …