Crispbread quality evaluation based on fusion of information from the sensor analogies to the human olfactory, auditory and tactile senses

Abstract

Appreciation of food is based on the perception all five human senses; vision, tactile, auditory, taste and olfaction. Sensory integration of chewing resistance, melting properties, crisp sound etc. will give a further perception of the food, which is called the mouth feel. In this report, a model experiment performed on crispbread is described, which was based on information fusion from human sense analogies of olfaction, auditory and tactile. Five samples of crispbread with various hardness and flour composition were placed in a special 'crush chamber'. While crushed, information corresponding to three senses could be obtained - auditory by a microphone, tactile by a force sensor and smell by leading gases from the crushed material to a gas sensor array. To evaluate the information obtained, multivariate pattern recognition methods, i.e. principal component analysis and artificial neural nets were used to search for structure and correlation in the data. It was shown that by using only the auditory information, the samples could not be separated. The tactile information alone could separate three samples, and the smell information one sample. By combining all sense analogues, all five samples could be separated.