Quality Control in Chocolate Coating Processes by Image Processing: Determination of Almond Mass and Homogeneity of Almond Spread

Nowadays, the need for standardization of all physical and chemical processes for high quality products leads us to adopt fast and precise decision-making mechanisms, such as image processing. Image processing is preferred in various areas due to its ease of application and proven usefulness. In the food industry specifically, it has been utilized for quality control of products at each stage of production. In this study, the aim is to prepare an image processing algorithm that determines the homogeneity of almond spread and almond mass of the chocolate coatings topped with almond. 40 images were digitally produced to represent the chocolate coating with almond. Half of the images were designed to be examples of homogenously spread almonds while the other half were of non-homogeneously spread almonds on the chocolate coating. The produced images were formed in 4 different almond mass, which were uniformly distributed among the data. The images were then processed to determine the homogeneity of almond spread and almond mass on the chocolate coating. Co-occurrence-matrix was used to test the homogeneity of the spread. With a properly chosen offset value, co-occurrence-matrix correlation value of the image was observed to be able to determine the homogeneity of the samples. To determine the almond mass, the images were first converted to black and white form and then simply the white color ratio in the images were evaluated, which is observed to be directly proportional to the almond mass. Consequently, it is shown that the proposed image processing methodology can be successful at determining homogeneity of almond spread and almond mass. Furthermore, the proposed methodology may also be utilized for other quality control applications where determination of homogeneity and amount are of importance.