WO2021176329A1

WO2021176329A1 - A system and method for quality check of cooked and packaged food

Info

Publication number: WO2021176329A1
Application number: PCT/IB2021/051688
Authority: WO
Inventors: Ankur Jain
Original assignee: Udyogyantra Technologies LLP
Current assignee: Udyogyantra Technologies LLP
Priority date: 2020-03-02
Filing date: 2021-03-01
Publication date: 2021-09-10
Anticipated expiration: 2022-09-02
Also published as: IN202011008924A

Abstract

A system and method for quality check of cooked and packaged food is disclosed. The system is a table top equipment with wifi / ethernet based internet connectivity which comprises an enclosure with a front opening (101); a tray (102) to hold a box of packaged food; a 1D/2D label code scanner (103) to scan the barcode/QR code associated with the box; a data capturing unit, comprising, an image capturing unit (106) to take the image of food, multipixel IR temperature sensors (105), load cell based weight measurement sensors (104), a processing unit (107), a display unit (108) to display the various parameters related to quality of food, a fan opening (109) for removal of vapors and odor, and a light source. The method for checking the quality of cooked and packaged food ensures that good quality food is delivered to users.

Description

A SYSTEM AND METHOD FOR QUALITY CHECK OF COOKED AND

PACKAGED FOOD

FIELD OF THE INVENTION

[001] The present invention relates to a system and method to check the quality of cooked and packaged food. Further, the system verifies the contents of packaged box being checked.

BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION

[002] In recent days, there is a paradigm shift in the food industry in terms of consumer needs and service providers. The Quick Service Restaurant (QSR) or cloud kitchen is an example of the service, which has grown rapidly and facilitates a consumption shift from home cooked food to food cooked in central kitchens. The food is cooked and packaged in boxes and thereafter delivered to be consumed within 30 to 60 minutes. The quality of the food delivered to the consumer is one of the key element, which needs to be monitored by every QSR to maintain customer satisfaction which in turn reciprocates the growth of QSR. Manual inspection of food quality in QSR is time consuming and prone to errors.

[003] Australian Patent 2018413638 discloses an IoT based apparatus to assess the quality of agricultural produce such as vegetable and fruits. The apparatus comprises a frame having an enclosure, a movable tray disposed at a middle portion of the enclosure, one or more camera installed within the enclosure, one or more light source strategically mounted within the enclosure to avoid reflection and hot spots, at least one storage unit, a touch screen display and a single board computer coupled to the camera, light source, storage unit and touch screen display. The enclosure is illuminated by the light source and the camera is configured to capture the image of the produce from both the top and bottom side of the produce. A pre trained deep learning model is used on both the top and bottom view images to identify defects in the agricultural produce. The identified defects are displayed to the user via the touch screen display. This patent discloses an apparatus which is used for inspection of agricultural produce. [004] Further, US Patent 7,860,277 discloses a food product checking system for identification and grading of food products packed in a tray, comprising of an apparatus including a tray positioning area, an illumination device for illuminating the food product with white light, at least one camera for taking images of the illuminated food product, and an evaluation device for image processing of taken images, wherein the evaluation device is adapted to perform a color analysis of taken images.

[005] However, the prior art pertaining to the quality assessment of food by automatic identification and verification of the content and type of food is still desired.

[006] Therefore, keeping in view the problems associated with the prior art, an efficient system and method for quality check of cooked and packaged food is required.

OBJECTIVE OF THE INVENTION

[007] The primary objective of the present invention is to provide a system and method for quality check of cooked and packaged food.

[008] Another objective is to provide a system and method to verify the content and type of food being accessed.

[009] Yet another objective is to provide a compact and portable system which can be easily incorporated in existing workflow of food delivery.

SUMMARY OF INVENTION

[0010] A system for inspecting the quality of cooked and packaged food is disclosed. The system scans the prepared food through rigorous quality checks to declare the food item as “Success” or “Failure” preventing inadequate, wrong, improperly cooked food to be delivered to users. The system uses the Internet of Things (IOT) nodes to acquire different parameters such as weight, temperature, identity and image of food and then sends these to a processing unit having monitoring and Artificial Intelligence technologies on cloud for global access and automated decision making.

[0011] The method for inspecting the quality of freshly cooked and packaged food ensures that good quality food is delivered to users. The method includes the scanning of barcode, fetching the details associated with the barcode, measuring of different parameter of packaged food on real time basis, matching of measured data with desired tolerance, and deciding the quality of packaged food for allowing delivery of the food.

BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF THE DRAWINGS

[0012] A complete understanding of the present invention may be obtained by reference to the accompanying drawings, when taken in conjunction with the detailed description thereof and in which:

[0013] Fig. 1 shows the various components of the system for quality check of cooked and packaged food;

[0014] Figure 2 illustrates the schematic block diagram for quality check process;

[0015] Figure 3 illustrates the schematic block diagram to represent the interaction between various components;

[0016] Figure 4(a-b) illustrates the method performed by the system to check the quality of cooked and packaged food.

[0017] Figure 5 illustrates the flow chart for the method to check the quality of cooked and packaged food. DETAILED DESCRIPTION OF THE INVENTION

[0018] The following presents a simplified description of the invention in order to provide a basic understanding of some aspects of the invention. This description is not an extensive overview of the present invention. It is not intended to identify the key/critical elements of the invention or to delineate the scope of the invention. Its sole purpose is to present some concept of the invention in a simplified form.

[0019] Accordingly, those of ordinary skill in the art will recognize that various changes and modifications of the embodiments described herein can be made without departing from the scope of the invention. In addition, descriptions of well-known functions and constructions are omitted for clarity and conciseness

[0020] Features that are described and/or illustrated with respect to one embodiment may be used in the same way or in a similar way in one or more other embodiments and/or in combination with or instead of the features of the other embodiments.

[0021] The terms and words used in the following description and claims are not limited to the bibliographical meanings, but, are merely used to enable a clear and consistent understanding of the invention. Accordingly, it should be apparent to those skilled in the art that the following description of exemplary embodiments of the present invention are provided for illustration purpose only and not for the purpose of limiting the invention.

[0022] It is to be understood that the singular forms “a,” “an,” and “the” include plural referents unless the context clearly dictates otherwise

[0023] It should be emphasized that the term “comprises/comprising” when used in this specification is taken to specify the presence of stated features, integers, steps or components but does not preclude the presence or addition of one or more other features, integers, steps, components or groups thereof. The equations used in the specification are only for computation purpose.

[0024] The Quick Service Restaurant (QSR) or cloud kitchen uses an enterprise resource planning (ERP) module, user management system, which receive orders and then delivers the same to users. The orders need to undergo through a quality check process to ensure that the quality food will be delivered only.

[0025] The present invention relates to a system and method for inspecting the quality of cooked and packaged food is disclosed. The present system is based on IOT (Internet of things), Artificial Intelligence technologies and cloud computing. The system includes IOT nodes to acquire different parameters such as weight, temperature, identity and image of food and then sends these to a processing unit having monitoring and Artificial Intelligence technologies on cloud for global access and automated decision making. The implementation of IOT in the cloud kitchen is having an architecture where the operational technologies (OT) such as sensors, actuators and information technologies (IT) are added to the kitchen infra to implement Artificial Intelligence (AI) based quality control.

[0026] In accordance with the present invention, Figure 1 shows the various components of the system for checking the quality of cooked and packaged food. The system comprises an enclosure with a front opening (101), a tray (102), barcode scanner (103), a weight capturing unit / sensor (104), single / multiple point temperature capturing unit / sensor (105), an image capturing unit / sensor (106), a processing unit (107), a display unit (108), a fan opening (109) and light source. In an exemplary embodiment, enclosure is made of glass material, specifically with 4 mm toughened glass casing.

[0027] Further, the said tray (102) is placed adjacent to front opening (101), above the weighing scale (104) and parallel to barcode scanner (103). The image capturing unit / sensor

(106), single/multiple point temperature capturing unit & sensor (105) and processing unit

(107) are placed at the top of the enclosure. Further, power source, light source and cables are also mounted on the top of the enclosure which keeps these components safe in case of food spill and ensure the service and repair work is done without touching the food compartment. LED lights used to facilitates uniform image capturing for advance visual analysis.

[0028] The front opening (101) is used to keep the box of packaged food on the tray (102). The said tray (102) is used to hold the box of packaged food having a barcode on it. The barcode scanner (103) scans the bar code associated with each box. The barcode scanning enables automatic detection of the food being inserted in packaging box. The barcode fetches the food identity, desired range of temperature and weight and reference image for sample from the data set. The said barcode scanner (103) may be but not limited to ID or 2D scanner.

[0029] The data capturing unit includes a weighing scale (104), an image capturing unit & sensor (106), single/multiple point temperature capturing unit & sensor (105) and a processing unit which together with the sensors, acts as an IOT node. The weighing scale (104) measures the weight of each box, temperature sensor (105) measures the temperature of the food and the image sensor (106) takes the image of the food. The temperature sensor (105) may include but not limited to infrared sensor. The infrared radiations across multiple pixels are detected by temperature sensor (105) to measure the temperature of food. Further, if packaging box has multiple sections containing different types of food, having intendent temperature criterion, then the sensor enables the multipoint measurement of temperature for the same. The said multipoint temperature measurement is done by one sensor which can have up to 8 pixels or using multiple such infra-red temperature sensors, all taking simultaneous temperature measurements. As an exemplary embodiment, the infrared sensor, TSEV0108L39, is used.

[0030] The image capturing unit (106) captures the image of food packaged in the box from top. Image capturing unit (106) is a special machine vision camera which is used for precision industrial inspection. Further, the IOT node cum processing unit (107) is used to acquire the data related to bar code, temperature, weight, identity and image of food, to do the processing and computations.

[0031] The processing unit (107) includes local processing device and communication to cloud base IT technologies, connected through internet gateway. The processing unit (107) processes the data acquired from various sensors and devices on the system, initially at the local processing device and then communicate with cloud based applications for further processing. Processing of data locally includes comparisons of acquired weight, temperature and image against the desired range of the corresponding parameters (fetched form the cloud). Further, the AI model is used to identify the food contents and visual quality parameters of food. The bar code, weight, image and temperature are logged against the order details in user management system. In an exemplary embodiment, a IOT Node Computing Device / Mini PC / Single Board Computer or equivalent running LINUX/WINDOWS, IP built in Lab VIEW or PYTHON is used; Amazon RDS or equivalent Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud based services is used to store weight and temperature; and Amazon S3 Bucket or equivalent Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud based services is used to store images. AI model gets periodically refined and re-trained by applications running on the cloud on the new food image data being constantly captured by the device.

[0032] The display unit (108) includes a graphical user interface which allows the user to operate the system. The validation buttons are integrated in graphical user interface which are pressed to start the process of quality check. The display unit (108) also displays the various parameters associated with quality of food to the QSR personal. The display unit (108) may include but not limited to a touch panel. Further, a fan opening (109) is present to mount a fan for removing the vapors and odor of food from the system.

[0033] The said system is being designed to make the food process and quality parameters available centrally and bring intelligence in the process variables to ultimately control those variables and increase user satisfaction rate and bring down the complaints of food temperature, texture and quantity for commercial kitchen operator.

[0034] Further, the said system will keep capturing the images for 2-3 months to train the AI model for each food type to identify factors on which food can be classified or clustered. In exemplary embodiments, the machine learning tool TensorFlow, Sagemaker, AMF, Apache MXNet or equivalent are used to train the data set into classes of the respective food items. [0035] The process for quality check of cooked and packaged food is illustrated through Figure 2. The barcode associated with each box is captured. The captured barcode is communicated to the processing unit (107) to be processed. The captured bar code is verified through server communication to ensure that it contains a valid food item according to existing workflow of QSR. Based on the validity of captured barcode the different parameters such as food name, desired temperature and weight range, sample image are fetched from the cloud and uploaded in local processing device associated with system. Afterwards, different parameters of the packaged food such as temperature, weight and image are captured on real time basis. The real time data captured by system is compared against the tolerances of temperature, weight and image model retrieved from cloud and the quality check of food in terms of ‘Success’ and ‘Failure’ is measured. The measured quality status along with different parameters is displayed on the display unit (108) and facilitates the delivery process. The delivery is disallowed if the packaged box is not able to pass the quality check process. [0036] Figure 3 is diagrammatically representing the interaction between various components of system. The temperature measured by temperature sensor / sensors (105), weight measured by weighing scale (104) and image captured by image grabbing unit (106) is transferred to the processing unit (107). The processing unit (107) compare the captured data in real time against the desired tolerance of respective data elements. The processing unit (107) interacts with display unit (108) to display the result of validation process.

[0037] Figure 4(a-b) and figure 5 illustrate the method performed by the system to check the quality of cooked and packaged food. The method of quality check of cooked and packaged food consists of following steps: · receiving a packaged box on the food tray (102) through front opening (101) with lid open for the quality check.

• Scanning of barcode associated with box by barcode scanner (103).

• Fetching of details associated with barcode from the ERP module and displaying on the display unit (108). • Pressing of validation buttons through graphical user interface to start the quality check process.

• Acquiring weight (104), temperature (105) and image (106) of packaged food simultaneously by sensors on real time basis.

• Matching of acquired temperature, weight and image with desired range of respective parameters by processing unit (107).

• Deciding quality as ‘Success’ and ‘Failure’ based on the matching,

• Displaying of the quality status message and other parameters on the display unit (108).

• Facilitating the delivery process based on quality status message.

[0038] Further, the image, weight and temperature of packaged food is logged against order details (bar code) in user management system and is used to address the complaints raised by users. The image captured is stored to train and refine the AI model periodically. The trained AI model can perform the inspection of the packaged food based on different factors such as type of food, contents, shape of food, different subsections in a portioned food preparation etc. within statistically significant ranges. Further, the captured or analyzed data (weight, temp, image etc.) can be shared with users by the organizations/catering service providers using the system and process.

[0039] While the present invention has been described with reference to one or more preferred aspects, which aspects have been set forth in considerable detail for the purposes of making a complete disclosure of the invention, such aspects are merely exemplary and are not intended to be limiting or represent an exhaustive enumeration of all aspects of the invention. The scope of the invention, therefore, shall be defined solely by the following claims. Further, it will be apparent to those of skill in the art that numerous changes may be made in such details without departing from the spirit and the principles of the invention.

Claims

CLAIMS:

1) A system for quality check of cooked and packaged food, comprising: an enclosure; a front opening (101); a tray (102) to hold a box of packaged food; a barcode scanner (103) to scan the bar code associated with the box; a data capturing cum processing unit (107) comprising : a weighing scale (104) to measure the weight of box; a single/multiple temperature sensors (105) to measure the multipoint temperature of food; an image capturing unit (106) to take the image of food; a display unit (108) to display the various parameters related to quality of food; a fan opening (109) to mount a fan for removal of vapors and odor of food; and a light source; wherein, the tray (102) is placed adjacent to front opening (101), above the weighing scale (104) and parallel to barcode scanner (103); the image capturing unit (106), temperature sensor/sensors (105), the processing unit (107) and light source are placed at the top of the enclosure.

2) The system for quality check of cooked and packaged food as claimed in claim 1, wherein the barcode scanner (103) is ID or 2 D scanner. 3) The system for quality check of cooked and packaged food as claimed in claim 1, wherein the sensor (105) is/are single / multiple pixel infrared sensor /sensors.

4) The system for quality check of cooked and packaged food as claimed in claim 1, wherein the image capturing unit (106) is a machine vision camera. 5) The system for quality check of cooked and packaged food as claimed in claim 1, wherein the display unit (108) is a touch screen panel.

6) The system for quality check of cooked and packaged food as claimed in claim 1, wherein the enclosure is made of glass material.

7) A method for quality check of cooked and packaged food, consisting the steps of:

• receiving a packaged box on the food tray (102) through front opening (101) with lid open for the quality check;

• scanning of barcode associated with box by barcode scanner (103);

• fetching of details associated with barcode and displaying on the display unit (108);

• pressing the validation buttons through graphical user interface included in the display unit to start the quality check process;

• acquisition of weight, temperature and image of packaged food simultaneously on real time basis;

• matching of acquired temperature, weight and image with desired range of respective parameters by processing unit (107);

• deciding of quality as ‘Success’ and ‘Failure’ based on the matching;

• displaying of the quality status message and other parameters on the display unit (108); and

• facilitating the delivery process based on quality status message.

8) The method for quality check of cooked and packaged food as claimed in claim 8, wherein the weight, image and temperature of packaged food is logged against order details.

9) The method for quality check of cooked and packaged food as claimed in claim 8, wherein image captured is stored to train the data set.