Chapter 20 - Cheese Quality Evaluation

Abstract

Computer vision applications for quality evaluation have spanned a wide spectrum of cheese quality attributes. These include overall appearance, such as cheese color, and inclusions such as herbs, spices, etc. to various end use and microstructural characteristics. Inspection of uniformity of distribution of sauce and toppings on baked pizza has been studied via computer vision technology. Several end use and functional qualities of cheese lend themselves readily for image processing. These include various factors that are important for cooked or baked cheese and cheese-containing foods including meltability, oiling-off, browning, and blister formation, etc. Examining the morphology and integrity of cheese shreds has been a challenging application due to the rather entangling nature of shreds and their propensity for fragmentation. Evaluating cheese defects, such as calcium lactose crystal formation and mechanical openings, have also been performed with computer vision. Finally, since cheese texture and quality attributes are manifested by the internal microstructure, objective evaluation of two-dimensional, three-dimensional, and even time evolution of four-dimensional cheese microstructure made possible by computer vision methodologies has been very useful.