Establishment of Database of Fluorescence Properties in Agriculture, Livestock, and Aquaculture for 9 Billion People’s Food Production

Project Gist

Fluorescence Response to solve the Trade-Off relation “Food Production and Environmental Problem” in 9 Billion Population Time

Keywords

Agricultural product, Fluorescence substance, Food inspection, Image processing, Database

Background and Purpose

To solve the global problem related to “Food” and “Environment,” the concept of Precision Agriculture, ICT based more food production with minimum environmental load will be essential for 9 billion population time. This project objective is to develop new technologies to reduce food loss, which is said to be 30 % of total amount of foods especially in post-harvest stage on preprocessing, processing, transporting and storage for quality evaluation and defect detection of agricultural, livestock and aquacultural products. Since the new technologies using agricultural products’ fluorescence substances can make their qualities, activities and slight defects on the products’ surfaces visible on images, they can contribute to food safety and security in the world.

Project Achievements

Fluorescence imaging devices were developed by Japanese companies based on collaboration with universities. Slight injuries on fruit surfaces and parasite worms on fish meets could be clearly detected by the fluorescence response so that the devices are being spread to the real situations in grading facilities and at cooking rooms in supermarkets and restaurants. One of Thai companies joined the workshop and started exchanging their activities because of the precise detections by fluorescence responses. Since European and African university researchers also came to hold collaborative researches using the fluorescence properties, fundamentals of our research group to collect fluorescence substance properties of agricultural products was established.

Future Prospects

Our group will try to get a new fund for the international collaborative researches to construct the fluorescence database of agricultural, livestock and aquacultural products. The collaborative research aims to develop and diffuse new technologies to inspect foods before storage of products in order to reduce the food loss especially in the tropical zone for solving the food-environment trade-off problem occurring in the world.

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Principal Investigator