Authenticating Material Components in Food Products: Flexible Querying by Sugeno integral

Authenticating the raw materials listed on food product labels is important to counter fraud and to increase consumer awareness of the quality of food products. This contribution presents a flexible querying approach based on the application of a Sugeno integral to automatically recognize the products’ species or varieties by exploiting their DNA barcodes. In facts, each animal and plant species and variety has its specific DNA barcode, that can be represented and distinguished by a dia-gram of characteristics peaks. In order to cope with several variabilities of the shapes of the DNA barcodes we proposed an automatic and flexible approach that also speeds up and standardizes the recognition process by the biologist. The approach is implemented in the context of a fuzzy database of time series in which flexible queries by examples are evalu-ated by applying a Sugeno integral that aggregates the similarities of the DNA bar-codes to determine the overall assessment of the recognized raw materials in each processed food product. The results demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposal and suitability for this purpose.