A Feasibility Study of a Microwave Imaging Device for In-Line Food Contamination Monitoring

Food quality is of a huge interest for food industry. In particular, the presence of small foreign fragments is generally the main issue in food quality control. While metal detectors can assess the presence of metal contaminants, they fail in detecting plastic or glass fragments. 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 target's movement and of the expected small size of the sought contamination is developed. In this communication, the basic idea of the approach is described and assessed in a simple (although meaningful) case.