PARTNERS
It involves in the project to coordinate WP2 and WP3, and to develop several tasks as described in the proposed activities section. Particularly the Unit is composed from two main expertise of the Department of Science of Agriculture, Food and Environment:
The Postharvest Research Unit
The Food Marketing unit
The Postharvest Research Unit
Throughout the last 20 years the Unit has gained worldwide esteemed experience in both conventional and nondestructive assessment of quality during postharvest storage of whole and minimally processed fresh produce. In fact, the unit will use acquired know-how concerning VIS-NIRS and HSI within activities of WP2 and WP3, with a strong collaboration with CNR Finally, UNIFG scientists have lately gained a solid experience on models for prediction of shelf-life of fresh produce with a number of studies on the application of mechanistic and empirical models, using accelerated shelf life testing methods also in the multivariate adaptation.
The Food Marketing unit
The unit has strong experience in statistical modeling of consumers 'preferences, international surveys on consumers' habits and recorded strict interactions with large companies and SMEs.
It involves in the project to coordinate WP1. It has experts in the field of sustainable management of greenhouse cultivation systems (soil-based and soilless) in Mediterranean environments, with a specific focus on sensor-based management systems; and in soil-based and soilless systems for vegetable greenhouse crops, with a specific focus on the effects of the cultivation processes management on the quality and nutritional profile of products. Their research activity is carried out at Experimental farm “La Noria”.
ISPA also has a Territorial Unit (URT) in Foggia, where research and technology transfer activities are carried out on the theme of improving the quality and preservability of fresh and fresh-cut fruit and vegetables products through the use of innovative technologies for packaging and logistics processing. Dr. Cefola M., who has matured a large experience in the field of conventional and non-destructive quality evaluation of fruits and vegetable by computer vision system, works in the Foggia URT.
The research group on "Visual and Computational Intelligence" of STIIMA, develops methodologies, technologies and systems for designing intelligent agents that can work autonomously or cooperate with human operators for taking decisions in different fields of applications. The Multi-spectral and Hyper-spectral Laboratory located in Bari, led by Dr. Giovanni Attolico, has a sound experience on research activities related to non-destructive and contactless quality evaluation and internal properties estimation using Computer Vision Systems. Its research is related to all the topics involved in this task, ranging from acquisition of signals and images, to pre-processing, features extraction, statistical analysis and machine learning for classification and regression.
