Imaging techniques in Agro-industry and their applications, a review

In both developing and developed countries, food quality, safety and food production is receiving maximum attention. The food production includes all the processes from receiving of the raw materials to the finished product. The food safety and quality implies a biological, chemical, and physical adulteration and other associated hazards. Quality assessment again is an important concept nowadays which is mostly performed manually; which can have errors. To overcome these limitations, new fast, environment friendly and economical techniques are sought. Imaging techniques have become more popular in food processing industry. The imaging technology takes the utilization of hardware to obtain the real-time image and software to process the images so that useful information from them can be extracted for food processing control and food safety analysis. The scanning methods mostly implied in the food industries include hyper-spectral, magnetic resonance, thermal and X-ray imaging. This technology has boosted the detection of foreign bodies, maturity evaluation of fruits, bruise detection of fruits, determination of fruit yield, fractal analysis and many other quality parameters associated with the food. The current review gives the general overview of various imaging techniques and their applications in the Agro- processing industry.