An approach towards quality assessment of turmeric rhizomes using surface thermal profiles

Thermal imaging techniques is an emerging non invasive method that is increasingly being studied for quality evaluation of agricultural and food products. There is limited reported literature on the quality assessment of turmeric rhizomes using machine vision techniques. In our study, we used passive thermography for obtaining surface thermal profiles of turmeric rhizomes at different time instants after the samples were heated for an hour in daylight conditions. The obtained thermal images were processed and the thermal profiles of the samples were computed. After normalization of the obtained thermal profiles, it was observed that the healthy rhizome samples had significantly different thermal profiles than the shriveled ones. The results are promising and further work is required to correlate the thermal profiles of the turmeric rhizomes with their chemical composition.