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Chapter 7
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-5225-3862-2.ch007
ABSTRACT
Food quality evaluation is a tedious job as it can be sensed either by its flavor, taste, or appearance.
Sensory evaluation for food quality determination is very complex and depends on biological sensor
systems and is subject to high variability depending on taster’s mood, physical state, etc. Moreover, as it
is purely subjective, the observations may vary for different tasters. For food industries the instrumental
means for quality monitoring has significant appreciations which are repeatable, accurate, and reliable.
Electronic nose is an array of sensors that senses based on aroma of samples. For the last two decades,
electronic nose has been applied in several domains of applications in food analysis, for example, food
quality monitoring based on seasonal effect, ageing, geographical origin, fermentation, etc. This chapter
aims to focus on different domains of application of electronic nose in food analysis.
INTRODUCTION
Olfaction or odour sensing is considered to be a conversion of chemical information into an electrical
signal. This chemical information carried through is essentially a code in live organic system and the
perception with discrimination is by stimulation of the olfactory nerve. In artificial systems, type, inten-
sity, occurrence of odours individually or collectively are to be considered for coding which is possible
through a model made a priori to be exploited for the purpose. Certain types of sensations known as
Electronic Noses in
Food Analysis
Runu Banerjee Roy
Jadavpur University, India
Rajib Bandyopadhyay
Jadavpur University, India
Bipan Tudu
Jadavpur University, India
Nabarun Bhattacharyya
Centre for Development of Advanced Computing, India