Polarised light stress analysis and laser scatter imaging for non-contact inspection of heat seals in food trays

This paper introduces novel non-contact methods for detecting faults in heat seals of food packages. Two alternative imaging technologies are investigated; laser scatter imaging and polarised light stress images. After segmenting the seal area from the rest of the respective image, a classifier is trained to detect faults in different regions of the seal area using features extracted from the pixels in the respective region. A very large set of candidate features, based on statistical information relating to the colour and texture of each region, is first extracted. Then an adaptive boosting algorithm (AdaBoost) is used to automatically select the best features for discriminating faults from non-faults. With this approach, different features can be selected and optimised for the different imaging methods. In experiments we compare the performance of classifiers trained using features extracted from laser scatter images only, polarised light stress images only, and a combination of both image types. The results show that the polarised light and laser scatter classifiers achieved accuracies of 96% and 90%, respectively, while the combination of both sensors achieved an accuracy of 95%. These figures suggest that both systems have potential for commercial development.

► We present a proof of concept for detecting faults in food tray seals.
► We use polarised light stress analysis achieving 96% accuracy.
► We use laser scatter imaging achieving 90% accuracy.
► Leaking food seals waste 480,000 tonnes of food in the UK alone.