Prediction of microbial spoilage and shelf-life of bakery products through hyperspectral imaging

The shelf life of bakery products highly depends on the environment and it may get spoiled earlier than its expiry which results in food-borne diseases and may affect human health or may get wasted beforehand. The traditional spoilage detection methods are time-consuming and destructive in nature due to the time taken to get microbiological results. To the best of the author’s knowledge, this work presents a novel method to automatically predict the microbial spoilage and detect its spatial location in baked items using Hyperspectral Imaging (HSI) range from 395 − 1000 nm. A spectral preserve fusion technique has been proposed to spatially enhance the HSI images while preserving the spectral information. Furthermore, to automatically detect the spoilage, Principal Component Analysis (PCA) followed by K-means and SVM has been used. The proposed approach can detect the spoilage almost 24 hours before it started appearing or visible to a naked eye with 98.13% accuracy on test data. Furthermore, the trained model has been validated through external dataset and detected the spoilage almost a day before it started appearing visually.