Hyperspectral imaging (HSI) is a robust and nondestructive method that can detect foreign particles such as microbial, chemical, and physical contamination in food. This review summarizes the work done in the last two decades in this field with a highlight on challenges, risks, and research gaps. Considering the challenges of using HSI on complex matrices like food (e.g., the confounding and masking effects of background signals), application of machine learning and modeling approaches that have been successful in achieving better accuracy as well as increasing the detection limit have also been discussed here. Foodborne microbial contaminants such as bacteria, fungi, viruses, yeast, and protozoa are of interest and concern to food manufacturers due to the potential risk of either food poisoning or food spoilage. Detection of these contaminants using fast and efficient methods would not only prevent outbreaks and recalls but will also increase consumer acceptance and demand for shelf‐stable food products. The conventional culture‐based methods for microbial detection are time and labor‐intensive, whereas hyperspectral imaging (HSI) is robust, nondestructive with minimum sample preparation, and has gained significant attention due to its rapid approach to detection of microbial contaminants. This review is a comprehensive summary of the detection of bacterial, viral, and fungal contaminants in food with detailed emphasis on the specific modeling and datamining approaches used to overcome the specific challenges associated with background and data complexity.

This paper provides a comprehensive analysis of the performance of hyperspectral imaging for detecting adulteration in red-meat products. A dataset of line-scanning images of lamb, beef, or pork muscles was collected taking into account the state of the meat (fresh, frozen, thawed, and packing and unpacking the sample with a transparent bag). For simulating the adulteration problem, meat muscles were defined as either a class of lamb or a class of beef or pork. We investigated handcrafted spectral and spatial features by using the support vector machines (SVM) model and self-extraction spectral and spatial features by using a deep convolution neural networks (CNN) model. Results showed that the CNN model achieves the best performance with a 94.4% overall classification accuracy independent of the state of the products. The CNN model provides a high and balanced F-score for all classes at all stages. The resulting CNN model is considered as being simple and fairly invariant to the condition of the meat. This paper shows that hyperspectral imaging systems can be used as powerful tools for rapid, reliable, and non-destructive detection of adulteration in red-meat products. Also, this study confirms that deep-learning approaches such as CNN networks provide robust features for classifying the hyperspectral data of meat products; this opens the door for more research in the area of practical applications (i.e., in meat processing).