Assessment of eggs freshness by means of pulsed infrared thermography

The paper examines the topic of identifying eggs freshness through an original approach based on pulsed thermography. The proposed method relies on a short thermal stimulation performed by means of a xenon flash, which rises up the temperature of the egg of less than 1 °C. The entire process requires about 1 s, thus providing an effective quality control tool for assessing the freshness of eggs intended for human consumption. The identification and evaluation procedure have been automated by developing a dedicated image processing algorithm. The software performs a series of preliminary operations on the acquired thermograms and returns an estimation of the air chamber’s projections, that are correlated to egg degradation and weight reduction.