This work, which was performed by two senior ECEE students from The University of Memphis (Allan Abraham and Kameshwaran Balachandran). In this outreach undergraduate research project, we have presented a low-cost method to distinguish the quality of different olive oils. The proposed method is based on an indirect measurement of the chlorophyll molecules present when a green laser diode illuminates the oil sample. Oil blends can be classified into five classes (no olive oil, light olive oil, medium olive oil, olive oil, and extra virgin olive oil) by quantifying the ratio of the red channel versus the green channel along the laser illumination path from a color image. This undergraduate research project introduces students to an interdisciplinary application requiring the combination of optical spectroscopy (i.e., multicolor imaging), and image processing. In addition, due to the simplicity of the optical apparatus and computational analysis, high school students could implement and validate their own cost-effective oil-quality classification device.
Multicolor Imaging of Olive Oil Blends
Classification algorithm based on image processing