Monitoring of Food Contamination via Microwave Imaging

Detecting food contamination in products moving along the production chain is a priority for every established food producer. Although detection technologies have been widely used in last years, low-density foreign bodies such as plastic, thin glass or wood are still undetectable to all established detection systems. Hence, the use of microwave imaging system to be used along the production chain is proposed in this work. This scenario implies a reduced time for data gathering and hence a limited amount of available data. To face this issue, an imaging system taking advantage of the targets movement and of the expected small size of the sought contamination is developed. The rationale of the approach is described and assessed in a simple, yet meaningful case.