Analisi dell'immagine e naso elettronico

The evaluation of shelf life of the foodstuff is a critical area in modern production and distribution, first of all in what concerns the products defined as fresh or fresh-like where the packaging has a decisive role on the maintaining of quality characteristics. In this perspective, there is a need for rapid and non-destructive methods to characterize the kinetics of the quality decay and to investigate the effect of the technological factors on the "freshness". Image analysis and the application of the electronic nose are promising and suitable methods for these studies: they investigate and parameterize objectively sensorial indices (appearance, colour and aromatic fingerprint), i.e. the most relevant factors for the choice and the consumption of foodstuff. A long experience in the use of these methods is reported in some case-studies: the evaluation of shelf life of fresh-like vegetables, the investigation on the freshness evolution of dairy products (crescenza), the discrimination of predictive effect of different storage technologies of some products with aromatic impact (fish and coffee). From these studies clearly appears the immediate applicability of the results obtained by using of these techniques, their potentiality on the in-situ quality control and on the compelling planes of sampling, the possibility to characterize multisensoristic strategies for the definition of shelf life based on the pattern recognition methods.