The Classification of Aflatoxin Contamination Level in Cocoa Beans using Fluorescence Imaging and Deep learning

Aflatoxin contamination in cacao is a significant problem in terms of trade losses and health effects. This calls for the need for a non-invasive, precise, and effective detection strategy. This research contribution is to determine the best deep-learning model to classify the aflatoxin contamination level in cocoa beans based on fluorescence images and deep learning to improve performance in the classification. The process involved inoculating and incubating Aspergillus flavus (6mL/100g) to obtain aflatoxin-contaminated cocoa beans for 7 days during the incubation period. Liquid Mass Chromatography (LCMS) was used to quantify the aflatoxin in order to categorize the images into different levels including “free of aflatoxin”, “contaminated below the limit”, and “contaminated above the limit”.  300 images were acquired through a mini studio equipped with UV lamps.  The aflatoxin level was classified using several pre-trained CNN approaches which has high accuracy such as GoogLeNet, SqueezeNet, AlexNet, and ResNet50. The sensitivity analysis showed that the highest classification accuracy was found in the GoogLeNet model with optimizer: Adam and learning rate: 0.0001 by 96.42%. The model was tested using a testing dataset and obtain accuracy of 96% based on the confusion matrix. The findings indicate that combining CNN with fluorescence images improved the ability to classify the amount of aflatoxin contamination in cacao beans. This method has the potential to be more accurate and economical than the current approach, which could be adapted to reduce aflatoxin's negative effects on food safety and cacao trade losses.