Machine vision for Quality inspection in Food manufacturing, processing and supply chain.🥦🍎🍼
The food industry is substantial, remarkably big. Moreover, with modernization and change in lifestyle of humankind, Sustainable and quality food has become a considerable concern. Due to the constant increase in the population and ever-growing increase in the food production demand, monitoring the food production and supply chain for low-quality detection is of utmost importance right now. As per a WHO report, an estimated 600 million — almost 1 in 10 people in the world — fall ill after eating contaminated food and 420,000 die every year.
Artificial Intelligence is already revolutionizing our daily lives; it has been addressing almost every industry we could think of right now from aircraft maintenance to the automated manufacturing industry. Machine vision making our lives easier by grasping the most mundane and very complex and tedious tasks. And in flash visual quality inspection piece of work will be taken over by machine allowing humans to concentrate on most sophisticated missions.
Is visual inspection is really required?🤔
The first question that comes to our mind is whether a visual inspection is required? That too in the food industry?
Well, any potentially high cost of errors that may arise via inspection such as injury, fatality, loss of expensive equipment, rework, or loss of a customer, and a threat to human health is to be addressed with utmost priority.
The field where visual inspection is prioritized includes nuclear weapon manufacturing, nuclear power, airport baggage screening, aircraft maintenance, medicine manufacturing, and pharmaceutical and well, well Food industry too.
Can you identify the difference between the two pictures??😵
(better when we have same images with and without humans in a FOOD processing factory, couldn’t find one😢)
Do you remember we use to solve this kind of problem is newspapers and magazines where we have to find the difference between two identical looking images. Good old days isn’t it.
Well, the vital difference in the two images above is humans are missing as well machines are doing better than human in visual quality inspection, you might ask why humans are no longer good at the visual inspection?
Why humans are not good at visual inspection?? why machines are having edge over us??👁🗨
There you go, machines are now enabled with very high optical resolution and they can see what human are not gifted with, compared to our eyes, machine vision has a wider spectrum of visual perception with the ability to perform observations in the Ultraviolet, X-ray and Infrared regions of the spectrum as well.
In addition, machine vision has other factors like Precision, speed, reliability, and most importantly independent of the operational environment.
How visual inspection can helps food industry?
Machine vision can help the food industry to automate and improve the quality aspects concerning color, size, shape, bruise, mold, ripeness, pest, etc.
Grading system: in food processing chain color, size, and shape are used as a feature for the grading process and to identify the ripeness, change in the quality. High-end supermarkets will favor perfect produce with target color ranges/shades, and they are willing to pay more for it. Therefore, it is in the farmer’s interest to ensure that it is graded accordingly and quickly.
Quality inout-side: For some food items, it is not a reasonable approach to just use the grading system to identify the quality of the food, NIR imaging can be used to identify the quality of the food concerning inside composition and outside appearance. For example foods like Apple can be screened for bruise detection even though it looks RED delicious outside!!, and fruits like avocado can be screened for ripeness measurement as color is not an indication for ripeness in avocado.
Pest and disease detection: In farms, an image classification based mobile application can be used to detect the possible pest are disease attached to the crops, as saying prevention is better than cure, early identification of pest and disease and treating the same at the right time can prevent enormous loss.
Assisted food packaging: automated machine vision can track the food packaging process all the time, keeping an eye on possible damage in packaging without human intervention.
What are the value edition to the existing Food industry by the automated visual inspection?🖖
Finally, at the end we might think Machine vision inspection is really cool and suits to food industry, tell me what are the benefits?
and the list goes on and on!!
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Happy learning😊😊😊
