Jose S. Torrecilla
Professor, Complutense University of Madrid, Spain
Title: Quality control of extra virgin olive oil by processing the images of olives
Biography
Biography: Jose S. Torrecilla
Abstract
The quality control in most producing industries is one of the most crucial points in world trade. This protection is even more important in the food sector, where not only the food quality must be controled, but also the health of their consumers and prevention of any type of adulteration must be ensured. This is why legal regulations are commonly published around the world. This situation is even more important when the goods are characteristic of a country’s idiosyncrasy, like the extra virgin olive oil (EVOO) from Mediterranean countries. Regarding the field of EVOO, a vital component of the Mediterranean diet, many research groups around the world are working on the development of methods to monitor its quality and prevent its loss. These groups are working on developing new equipment, applications, and/or powerful chemometric tools to detect any condition that causes a decrease of EVOO quality. Most of them are working with the oil itself, but here a new way based on the analysis of the olive images by supervised artificial neural network is proposed. The independent variables of the model have been taken from olive photographs to design a fast way to clasify olives according to their quality. The percentage of misclasification of this tool is lower than 5%. These results offer a good tool to protect EVOO quality, as success in this regard would be compelling for the EVOO producers, as better olives are directly related to the production of higher-quality extra virgin olive oils.
