Recent developments and applications of image features for food quality evaluation and inspection – a review

This paper reviews the techniques available for image feature extraction and their applications in the food industry up to now according to the four major kinds of image features, i.e., colour, size, shape, and texture. Results from previous studies have shown that each kind of image features contained important information required for food quality evaluation and inspection. Furthermore, the proper combination of different kinds of image features can normally increase the accuracy of the evaluation results; sometimes such a combination might even reveal some quality attributes that cannot be identified by using only a single kind of image features. Further to this, the feature extraction techniques were compared with each other, and their advantages, disadvantages, and feasibilities in different applications were also discussed.