Controlling a large-scale industrial oven by monitoring the food quality, both internally and externally, using an optical fibre based system

An optical fibre based sensor system has been developed for the purpose of examining the colour of food products online as they cook in a large-scale industrial oven. By classifying the measured colours it is possible to automatically determine if the food is cooked to an optimum perceived colour. Developments have been made on previous work by the authors (O'Farrell et al., 2002 and 2003) by further examining the internal colour of the food and also looking at food that does not have an even colour externally. Spectroscopic techniques are employed to determine the colour and this signal is interrogated using an artificial neural network. The resultant output spectral patterns can therefore be quantitatively classified and thus categorized.