Computer vision technology for food quality assurance

Quality assurance is one of the most important goals of any industry. The ability to manufacture high-quality products consistently is the basis for success in the highly competitive food industry. It encourages loyalty in customers and results in an expanding market share. The quality assurance methods used in the food industry have traditionally involved human visual inspection. Such methods are tedious, laborious, time-consuming and inconsistent. As plant throughput increased and quality tolerance tightened, it became necessary to employ automatic methods for quality assurance and quality control. During the past decade, computers have been introduced widely for automation of the quality assurance task. The food industry has been traditionally slow in adopting this new technology and moving towards programmable automation’. Renard? cited the following barriers to automating food processing plants: diverging opinions of what to measure because manufacturing processes themselves are not well understood; lack of appropriate standards against which properties can be compared; and the age of plants and equipment. However, the speed, reliability and cost savings inherent to process automation have provided sufficient impetus to the food industry to pursue aggressively the automatic, on-line control of all plant operations. Innovation of new technology often undergoes four phases3. The first is a research or discovery phase, in which new knowledge results in advances in the technology. Phase two is the early commercialization phase, in which a small market for the technology develops. Phase three represents the emergence of niche-specific applications of the technology. The last phase is that of widespread proliferation. A key characteristic of phase four is that the technology is transparent to users, that is,