Non-invasive analytical technology for the detection of contamination, adulteration, and authenticity of meat, poultry, and fish: a review

Abstract

The requirement of real-time monitoring of food products has encouraged the development of non-destructive measurement systems. Hyperspectral imaging is a rapid, reagentless, non-destructive analytical technique that integrates traditional spectroscopic and imaging techniques into one system to attain both spectral and spatial information from an object that cannot be achieved with either digital imaging or conventional spectroscopic techniques. Recently, this technique has emerged as one of the most powerful and inspiring techniques for assessing different meat species and building chemical images to show the distribution maps of constituents in a direct and easy manner. After presenting a brief description of the fundamentals of hyperspectral imaging, this paper reviews the potential applications of hyperspectral imaging for detecting the adulteration, contamination, and authenticity of meat, poultry, and fish. These applications envisage that hyperspectral imaging can be considered as a promising non-invasive analytical technique for predicting the contamination, adulteration, and authenticity of meat, poultry, and fish in a real-time mode.

Keywords: Adulteration; Authenticity; Contamination; Fish; Hyperspectral imaging; Meat; Non-destructive method; Poultry.