Morphological image processing for echo detection on ultrasonic signals: An application to foreign bodies detection in the alimentary industry

Echo detection on time-varying signals is a typical problem of signal processing. A not so typical application of this problem is the detection of foreign bodies in the alimentary industry. In this work we are going to present some results of a project whose objective was to develop an ultrasonic automatic system for detection of foreign bodies. The algorithm presented merge some ideas of time frequency representation (TFR) and morphological image processing to get an easy to implement and highly customizable algorithm that could be applied to many different products and situations.