With ever increasing automation and requirements for lower process times, LED systems are finding a number of applications in the agri-foods process industries.

In recent years, there has been a dramatic increase in the concern for the quality and safety of food products. The presence of foreign objects in processed meat is a prominent safety concern.

The ability to rapidly detect such foreign objects could be used for sorting prior to processing. Systems such as MRI and X-ray have limited capability of non-invasively monitoring food products to detect the presence of foreign objects. Whilst such systems show some effectiveness the machines of this type are too costly and generally too slow to be used in the meat industry. Indeed, in the case of X-rays there may be inherent safety hazards with such machines and the fact that the meat becomes "irradiated" when passed through such a system.

The food processing industry is actively seeking technologies for inspection and sorting of raw and finished materials. Inspection of raw material using fully automated production systems is a challenge where high production rates and variability exist. In many cases, the raw material quality varies naturally and is difficult to measure.

Current manufacturers are predominantly using manual checking processes to check for bone but intend to replace these checks with a reliable and reproducible technology.

Enfis has been researching and developing novel Multi-watt LED Light Engine solutions based upon inspection and detection technologies which are finding use in the agri-foods markets. Enfis has developed and patented a novel light-based technique for use in the detection of foreign objects and seeks to exploit this technology by the manufacture of systems using this technique or license of the technique to larger companies.

Such Multi-watt LED Light Engine systems are low-cost, robust, safe (low voltage) and flexible in both size and wavelength of illumination. They also have tailorable emission profiles which can be focussed or expanded to suit the needs of the particular inspection system.

The Enfis approach will enable systems to be developed which answer a large number of the current issues facing sensor technologies in the industrial areas such as:

• More robust sensors to work in harsh environments.
• Colour image processing techniques using filters and neural nets for better defect/grading capabilities.
• The development of vision systems with perceptions that are in good agreement with subjective human classifications for colour and texture.
• Defect/foreign object detection technologies which find a larger percentage of defects.

Such sensing/quality detection systems will be implemented into other industrial areas where applicable through the same large partner agreement approach that Enfis uses in this and other sectors.