Detection of Soft Foreign Materials in Food using Sub-Terahertz Radar


JIITA, vol.7 no.3, p.770-774 2023, DOI: 10.22664/ISITA.2023.7.3.776

Donghoon Kwak, Seungeon Song, Jonghun Lee, Youngduk Kim

Abstract: In the food industry, hygiene management is an important issue. In particular, it is crucial to prevent foreign materials because ingestion of foreign materials can cause serious harmfulness such as tooth damage and food poisoning. Accordingly, research on the detection of foreign materials through non-destructive testing is being actively conducted. There are two kinds of conventional methods for foreign material detection. The first method is surface inspection by detecting foreign materials on the surface of food through vision or spectroscopy. The second method is penetration inspection such as X-ray inspection and metal detector inspection. However, these methods can only detect metal or hard foreign materials. Therefore, it cannot detect soft foreign materials such as insects. To solve this problem, we propose a penetration inspection using sub-terahertz radar. This method can detect both hard and soft foreign materials. It is even harmless to the human body, making it suitable for food non-destructive inspection. However, signals obtained by penetrating food through terahertz waves contain a lot of noise. In this paper, we also propose a preprocessing method for denoising to accurately detect foreign materials. After preprocessing, noise is significantly attenuated and only the food edge line and foreign substances are emphasized.

Keywords: Terahertz, Radar, Image-Processing, Foreign material detection

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