Usability of Foldscope in Food Quality Assessment Device

Abstract

This work focuses on the quality assessment of agricultural product based on microscopic image, generated by Foldscope. Microscopic image-based food quality assessment always be an efficient method, but its system complexity, costly, bulk size and requirement of special expertise confines it usability. To encounter such issues, Foldscope which is small, lightweight, cheap and easy to use has been considered to verify its usability as food quality assessment device. In this purpose, measuring starch of potato has been selected to check its compatibility and microscopic images are taken from two image modalities—conventional microscope and Foldscope and the results have been compared. The image processing techniques including morphological filtering followed by Otsu’s method has been employed to detect starch efficiently. In total, 20 images from each of the system have been captured. Following the experiment, the presence of starch (in %) estimated based on the image taken from microscope and Foldscope are 23.50 ± 0.79 and 24.29 ± 0.73 respectively, which is consistent. Such results reveal that the Foldscope can be used in food quality assessment system, which could make such devices simple, portable and handy.