This is a colorimetric application of vision systems were in an automatic pizza machine the cooking status is estimated on-line in order to switch off the oven when the pizza is well cooked. This is a significant safety improvement when a dough with too little or absence of stuffing can generate fumes or even catch fire.
Main difficulty was the possibility to have a colorimetric estimation without a proper illumination as it is obtained with no special apparatus, i.e. by the cooking lamp itself mainly emitting in IR. This led the development of the on-line quality control toward a sophisticated elaboration in the “Lab” colorimetric plane by the use of information fusion between invariant moments and histogram evolution.
In addition a pre-quality verification is integrated in order to verify the integrity of the product before cooking. This maximizes safety as far as the dough without tomato or with few water can catch fire.
This was an industrial research developed in collaboration with SITOS, http://www.sitos.it/