人工知能を用いた食品の高品質化への挑戦

抄録

Consumer demand for delicious food is ever increasing. In order to respond accurately and promptly to such demands from consumers, it is essential to rationally improve the quality of food. In such a situation, conventional thinking and empirical knowledge are not enough, and artificial intelligence (AI) is attracting attention as a new tool. Currently, AI is being actively introduced in industrial food production lines for the detection of foreign substances and visual inspection of materials and processed foods. On the other hand, in the fields of food processing and evaluation, there are not so many examples of AI utilization other than those mentioned above. This means that although AI has been very well developed in recent years, there are still challenges. In this paper, we outlined AI and introduced three case studies from the research topics we are working on. First, we explained how to analyze the relationship between food processing conditions and evaluation values obtained by instrument measurement using AI, taking as an example the effect of the structure of gluten protein inside noodles on its texture. Second, we explained how to utilize AI for instrument measurement of foods, taking as an example the development of a bread quality evaluation method based on hollow structures. Third, we explained how to incorporate AI into sensory evaluation, taking as an example the development of a method for measuring the food palatability that human perceive when chewing.