Over the past few decades, the food industry has undergone revolutionary changes due to the impacts of globalization, technological advancements, and ever-evolving consumer demands. Artificial intelligence (AI) and big data have become pivotal in strengthening food safety, production, and marketing. With the continuous evolution of AI technology and big data analytics, the food industry is poised to embrace further changes and developmental opportunities. An increasing number of food enterprises will leverage AI and big data to enhance product quality, meet consumer needs, and propel the industry toward a more intelligent and sustainable future. This review delves into the applications of AI and big data in the food sector, examining their impacts on production, quality, safety, risk management, and consumer insights. Furthermore, the advent of Industry 4.0 applied to the food industry has brought to the fore technologies such as smart agriculture, robotic farming, drones, 3D printing, and digital twins; the food industry also faces challenges in smart production and sustainable development going forward. This review articulates the current state of AI and big data applications in the food industry, analyses the challenges encountered, and discusses viable solutions. Lastly, it outlines the future development trends in the food industry.

Imbalanced data causes deep neural networks to output biased results, and it becomes more serious when facing extremely imbalanced data regarding the outliers with tiny size (the ratio of the outlier size to the image size is around 0.05%). Many data argumentation models are proposed to supplement imbalanced data to alleviate biased results. However, the existing augmentation models cannot synthesize tiny outliers, which makes the generated data unavailable. In this paper, we propose a new augmentation model named Extremely Imbalanced Data Augmentation Generative Adversarial Nets ($EID$-GAN) to address the extremely imbalanced data augmentation problem. First, we design a new penalty function by subtracting the outliers from the cropped region of generated instance to guide the generator to learn the features of outliers. After that, we combine the output value of the penalty function with the generator loss to jointly update the generator’s parameters with back-propagation. Second, we propose a new evaluation approach that adopts two outlier detectors with k-fold cross-validation to assess the availability of generated instances. We conduct extensive experiments to demonstrate the significant performance improvement of $EID$-GAN on two extremely imbalanced datasets: industrial Piston and Fabric datasets; and one general imbalanced dataset: the public DAGM dataset. The experimental results show that our $EID$-GAN outperforms the SOTA augmentation models on different imbalanced datasets.

The generative adversarial network (GAN) is usually built from the centralized, independent identically distributed (i.i.d.) training data to generate realistic-like instances. In real-world applications, however, the data may be distributed over multiple clients and hard to be gathered due to bandwidth, departmental coordination, or storage concerns. Although existing works, such as federated learning GAN (FL-GAN), adopt different distributed strategies to train GAN models, there are still limitations when data are distributed in a non-i.i.d. manner. These studies suffer from convergence difficulty, producing generated data with low quality. Fortunately, we found that these challenges are often due to the use of a federated averaging strategy to aggregate local GAN models' updates. In this article, we propose an alternative approach to tackling this problem, which learns a globally shared GAN model by aggregating locally trained generators' updates with maximum mean discrepancy (MMD). In this way, we term our approach improved FL-GAN (IFL-GAN). The MMD score helps each local GAN hold different weights, making the global GAN in IFL-GAN getting converged more rapidly than federated averaging. Extensive experiments on MNIST, CIFAR10, and SVHN datasets demonstrate the significant improvement of our IFL-GAN in both achieving the highest inception score and producing high-quality instances.