Hyperspectral imaging for differentiation of foreign materials from pinto beans

Food safety and quality in packaged products are paramount in the food processing industry. To ensure that packaged products are free of foreign materials, such as debris and pests, unwanted materials mixed with the targeted products must be detected before packaging. A portable hyperspectral imaging system in the visible-to-NIR range has been used to acquire hyperspectral data cubes from pinto beans that have been mixed with foreign matter. Bands and band ratios have been identified as effective features to develop a classification scheme for detection of foreign materials in pinto beans. A support vector machine has been implemented with a quadratic kernel to separate pinto beans and background (Class 1) from all other materials (Class 2) in each scene. After creating a binary classification map for the scene, further analysis of these binary images allows separation of false positives from true positives for proper removal action during packaging.