Microwave imaging technology for in-line food contamination monitoring

Foreign body contamination in food is one of the major sources of complaints against food manufacturers, and it can lead to injury, loss of brand loyalty and large recall expenses. Different technologies, such as X-ray or infrared techniques, are currently applied to detection systems used for food inspection, but physical contamination, with e.g. wood, plastic, metal and glass fragments, is still present in food. For this reason, there is the interest to develop new technologies able to address the still unmet needs of food industry. In this paper, we report about preliminary investigations of the use of the microwave imaging technology for food contamination monitoring. Numerical results show the feasibility of the proposed approach. The realization of prototype measurement system is under development.