An overview of signal processing for food inspection

Millions of people experience serious health problems following consumption of unsafe or contaminated food. This article introduces the signal processing community to the challenges that arise in food inspection. Focus is on traditional food-inspection technologies, which rely on sample collection and subsequent off-line analysis in a laboratory and newer approaches that use nondestructive methods to measure various quality parameters of food products in real time. Four specific examples, namely, pistachio sorting, wheat inspection, mycotoxin detection and acrylamide detection are considered to illustrate the breadth of technologies currently in use in food inspection and the challenges that remain to be addressed.