New vision technology for multidimensional quality monitoring of continuous frying of meat

The potential of using multi-spectral vision technology for quality control in a continuous frying process was investigated. Canonical discriminant analysis of the multi-spectral images of samples of fried minced meat and diced turkey could clearly visualise the effect of different heat treatments. The vision technology can also detect even slight increases in the agglutination of the fried minced meat during the process. This agglutination is undesirable, but very difficult to measure on-line. The results indicate that multi-spectral vision technology may partially or totally substitute visual inspection by an operator as a means of assessing product quality during processing.