Physical Contamination Detection in Food Industry Using Microwave and Machine Learning

• Published in: Electronics (Basel) 2022-10, Vol.11 (19), p.3115-17/3115
• Main Authors: Darwish, Ali, Ricci, Marco, Zidane, Flora, Vasquez, Jorge A. Tobon, Casu, Mario R, Lanteri, Jerome, Migliaccio, Claire, Vipiana, Francesca
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Algorithms; Antennas; Contaminants; Datasets; Dielectric properties; Electromagnetism; Engineering Sciences; Food; Food contamination; Food contamination & poisoning; Food industry; Food packaging; Food products; Foreign bodies; Hyperspectral imaging; Infrared imaging; Machine learning; Penetration depth; Prevention; Production lines; Quality management; Safety and security measures; Support vector machines; Workflow
• ISSN: 2079-9292; 2079-9292
• DOI: 10.3390/electronics11193115

The detection of contaminants in food products after packaging by a non-invasive technique is a serious need for companies operating in the food industry. In recent years, many technologies have been investigated and developed to overcome the intrinsic drawbacks of the currently employed techniques, such as X-rays and metal detector, and to offer more appropriate solutions with respect to techniques developed in the academic domain in terms of acquisition speed, cost, and the penetration depth (infrared, hyperspectral imaging). A new method based on MW sensing is proposed to increase the degree of production quality. In this paper, we are going to present a novel approach from measurements setup to a binary classification of food products as contaminated or uncontaminated. The work focuses on combining MW sensing technology and ML tools such as MLP and SVM in a complete workflow that can operate in real time in a food production line. A very good performance accuracy that reached 99.8% is achieved using the non-linear SVM algorithm, while the accuracy of the performance of the MLP classifier reached 99.3%.