An Overview of Signal Processing for Food Inspection [Applications Corner]

The goal of this article is to introduce the signal processing community to the challenges that arise in food inspection. We briefly describe both traditional food-inspection technologies, which rely on sample collection and subsequent offline analysis in a laboratory, and newer approaches that use nondestructive methods to measure various quality parameters of food products in real time. We focus on four specific examples to illustrate the breadth of technologies currently in use in food inspection and the challenges that remain to be addressed. In each case, we describe the problem setting and its economic and health aspects; the techniques that are used, including the physical principles on which these techniques are based; and their performance and cost