Applications of Computer Vision for Assessing Quality of Agri-food Products: A Review of Recent Research Advances

Abstract

With consumer concerns increasing over food quality and safety, the food industry has begun to pay much more attention to the development of rapid and reliable food-evaluation systems over the years. As a result, there is a great need for manufacturers and retailers to operate effective real-time assessments for food quality and safety during food production and processing. Computer vision, comprising a nondestructive assessment approach, has the aptitude to estimate the characteristics of food products with its advantages of fast speed, ease of use, and minimal sample preparation. Specifically, computer vision systems are feasible for classifying food products into specific grades, detecting defects, and estimating properties such as color, shape, size, surface defects, and contamination. Therefore, in order to track the latest research developments of this technology in the agri-food industry, this review aims to present the fundamentals and instrumentation of computer vision systems with details of applications in quality assessment of agri-food products from 2007 to 2013 and also discuss its future trends in combination with spectroscopy.

Automated Classification for Visual-Only Postmortem Inspection of Porcine Pathology

“…Automated image analysis has been quite widely applied to the assessment of meat quality and safety. Ma et al [8] provide a short review of some of these applications. Craigie et al [9] review the use of image analysis for evaluation of beef carcasses specifically.…”

A Distributed K-Means Segmentation Algorithm Applied to Lobesia botrana Recognition

“…The idea was to replace traditional manual operations that are labor intensive, slow, and prone to human error [10]. Despite the significant advances over the past decade, the creation of new algorithms, new paradigms, and new challenges to processing big complexity data allows applying computer vision research in real world problems, with a particular focus in agriculture [11][12][13][14].…”

Fish fillet authentication by image analysis

“…A large number of computer vision systems have been investigated and applied in the agri-food system answering the need of simple, rapid, and non-destructive but reliable evaluation tools for the assessment of food quality and safety during production and processing (Ma et al, 2016). The computer vision bases go back to '60s (Baxes, 1994), though its implementation in the food industry grew mainly in the last two decades.…”