Artificial Intelligence Advances Food Safety

Machine vision has long found a place in food safety, working 24/7 without fatigue. But as data access increases and processing power improves, machine vision is finding even more opportunities through the added capabilities of artificial intelligence (AI). To take one example, traditional machine vision tends to struggle to inspect for contamination in sun-dried tomatoes. But it's an application that's well suited to AI. "Similar to a human, AI is very good at dealing with a lot of variations in whatever's being looked at," says Quinn Killough, senior business development manager for Landing AI, a company that provides end-to-end AI platforms for manufacturing. "That type of application, because there's so much variability in what a tomato could look like or what kind of contamination could be on it, it was a pretty tough machine vision problem in general. A human can do it easily. And it turns out AI can do it fairly easily as well. Being able to deal with all that variation in what you're looking at, it makes it very well suited for AI."