Hyperspectral Imaging In Food Industry

The population growth in the world today has boosted mass food production and packaging and increased the demand for low production costs and high efficiency processes. Therefore, the food industry is faced with several challenges, including safeguarding the high-quality standards of food products and providing assurance of food safety while circumventing any liability issues. Achieving these challenges has become vital in regards to grading food products for diverse markets, but conventional food analysing methods are destructive and time consuming, hence development of non-destructive and efficient techniques are important to raise the competitiveness and to expand market share.

During the past few decades many techniques have been experimented

Although the hyperspectral imaging was initially developed for remote sensors, it is now widely used to obtain spectral and spatial information of a food sample in the visible spectrum (VIS), near-infrared (NIR) and ultraviolet (UV) spectral regions. [2][15] The hyperspectral imaging has many advantages over simple visual colour imaging, near-infrared spectroscopy and multispectral imaging technique, including the ability to gather large and comprehensive spectral and spatial information. Due to the innate qualities of this technique, it has been put to application in various fields such as agriculture and pharmaceutical industries. Detecting contaminations, identifying defects and quantifying the composition are few of the applications that the technology is currently used for. In recent times, the technique has become more and more accepted in food quality control in order to supply consumer demands and to prevail over the legal constrains and market segmentation

Since the hyperspectral imaging system has its unmatched advantages, because of the novelty of the system, it is currently facing many difficulties to be accepted as the most preferable technique for detecting food safety threats.[32] This is due to the fact that not all chemical compositions that exists in nature is currently detected and studied to repeat the process in the industry in such a way that they can be detected to avoid legal issues regarding the food safety. Also the datacube obtained from hyperspectral imaging is large in size, that storing and transferring data through networks are currently a huge drawback to maintain a central library of spectral data that can be standardised among industries. Due to the current development of ultra fast computers and high speed networking the agriculture, pharmaceutical and food industries are beginning to test the technology in highly paced automated