Fusion of electronic nose, electronic tongue and computer vision for animal source food authentication and quality assessment - A review

Electronic nose, electronic tongue and computer vision systems, designed to artificially perceive flavour and appearance, have been increasingly used in the food industry as rapid and reliable tools for quality assessment. The use of multivariate analysis methods, together with electronic senses, has shown to be very powerful; however, due to the high complexity of food, the employment of just single sensor data is often insufficient. In recent years, much research has been performed to develop several data fusion strategies, combining the outputs of multiple instrumental sources, for improving the quality assessment and authentication of food. The aim of this work is to review the recent achievements in the field of artificial sensors' application, in the evaluation of animal source food products.