Detection of foreign substances in food using thermography

This paper gives a short introduction into the possibility of detecting foreign bodies in food by using IR thermography. The first results shown for combinations of cherries and chocolate and berries contaminated with leaves, stalks, pedicel and thorns could be easily evaluated manually. Therefore the differing emissivity coefficients or the different heat conductivities and/or capacities are used for differentiation. Applying pulse thermography, first heat conductivity measurements of different food materials are performed. Calculating the contrast of possible food/contaminant combinations shows the difficulty of differentiating certain materials. A possible automatic evaluation for raisins contaminated with wooden sticks and almonds blended with stones could be shown. The power of special adapted algorithms using statistical or morphological analysis is shown to distinguish the foreign bodies from the foodstuff.