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Leeds Beckett uses AI to increase food safety

26 March 2024

Leeds Beckett University has partnered with a family-owned Bradford business to revolutionise the screening process for aflatoxin in pistachio nuts, using artificial intelligence (AI).

The academic team has established a Knowledge Transfer Partnership, partially funded by the Government through Innovate UK, to develop a screening platform in collaboration with Father’s Farm Foods - a small, family-owned processor of imported fruit and nuts.

Pistachios are particularly vulnerable to aflatoxin contamination – a carcinogenic toxin that also encourages mould growth in processed products. The key to reducing overall infection levels lies in excluding highly contaminated nuts. Traditionally, this has involved manually inspecting the nuts under specialised lighting – a costly, time-consuming, and unreliable process that sometimes results in discarding entire batches.

Dr Akbar Sheikh-Akbari, of Leeds Beckett University, is leading the project. He said: “We are developing an innovative method to identify infected pistachio nuts using hyperspectral imaging technology. This provides a detailed ‘fingerprint’ of an object’s composition. By analysing a broad spectrum of light and breaking down each pixel, it yields significantly more information about an image. This technique, new to both Father’s Farm Foods and the industry, will enable the company to automate the screening process, reduce waste and costs, and enhance factory efficiency.”

The team will create a hyperspectral image dataset of pistachio nuts with known infection levels and will then train an AI model to classify new images based on their level of contamination. 

Dr Hossein Mehrabinejad, CEO at Father’s Farm Foods, said: “We are excited to take the business to the next level with this collaboration and aim to offer the screening service to other companies for a fee in the next stage.”

The KTP will run for 33 months, and will be managed by a full-time Research Assistant, Sina Mahroughi, with the support of three expert Leeds Beckett academics. 

Hyperspectral imaging is listed as one of Innovate UK’s 50 Emerging Technologies – and is identified as having potential to save lives by monitoring extreme climate events and better understanding of weather systems and has potential benefits for healthcare through better classification of wounds and clearer imaging of microbes.


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