How AI-Powered Vision Inspection Systems Can Enhance Foreign Material Detection

Foreign material is commonly a leading cause for food recalls. Glass, metal, plastic, wood, paper: these contaminants can enter at any point on the line, and the pressure to catch them keeps growing.

In this article from Quality Assurance & Food Safety, KPM Analytics' Yuegang Zhao (Chief Commercial Officer) explains how AI is changing what vision inspection can catch. Traditional color-based systems struggle when a defect blends in—a hardened piece of dough on a bun, or black plastic hidden by blood on a cut of meat. Because no two pieces of meat look alike, AI-powered systems learn from real product images and adapt to natural variation, detecting problems that older methods miss.

Zhao's central point is that AI and traditional systems work best together, not one replacing the other. AI finds more, but it can also flag a good product by mistake, so a proven second method helps confirm the call.

He is also candid about what adoption requires. As he puts it, "AI needs some time to get trained." The facilities that treat it as a long-term process, rather than an instant fix, are the ones that see results.

Read the article on Quality Assurance & Food Safety Magazine's website.