Inline HSI food inspection and concentrationmeasurements of pharmaceuticals – a reportfrom an industrial environment

Current food diagnostic measurement techniques tend
to suffer from unreliable chemometric quantification and poor
spatial resolution. Chemical components in food such as sugar,
fat,water and dry substance are today inferred from destructive,
lab based, techniques that measure chemical composition
albeit with limited statistical accuracy and insufficient precision
for food quality monitoring. Technologies such as NIR hyperspectral
imaging (HSI) and FTNIR offer the potential for accurate,
fast and efficient evaluation of chemical components accurately
over the whole food production cycle. In this regard, the
disentanglement of spectral endmembers from a mixed detector
response due to background and multiple chemical constituents
is both crucial and scientifically challenging for a reliable signal
detection in terms of illumination technique, data pre-processing
and multivariate analysis. In this talk various inline applications
employing NIR hyperspectral imaging using the HELIOS
camera system will be presented, including examples and results
from a prototype project in pharmaceuticals and a joint study in
which HSI quantitative analysis of chemical concentration gradients
found in potatoes and wheat grains are discussed.