On 30th September – 4th October, 2023 the participants of the „FOOD Quality in Digital Age” project visited Serbia for a study visit organized by the Faculty of Agriculture of the University of Belgrade, Serbia in Belgrade and Kopaonik. The visit was combined with Partners’ participation in the 62nd International Meat Industry Conference and focused on promotion and dissemination of the first results of the project. Participation in the conference allowed the Consortium to exchange knowledge and experience as well as contribute to spreading research excellence to the Balkan region, opening new possibilities of future cooperation, empowering young researchers and sustaining the independence of research.
During the visit, PhD students and researchers from Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary and Serbia took part in the third module of the 5-modules training on digital food quality evaluation methods. According to his expertise, the Host – Prof. Igor Tomašević – provided a training on computer vision system (CVS) for food quality assessment. Computer vision is a field that involves making a machine ‘‘see”. Humans use their eyes and their brains to see and visually sense the world around them. Computer vision is the science that aims to give a similar, if not better, capability to a machine or computer. CVS is concerned with the automatic extraction, analysis and understanding of useful and meaning information from a single image or a sequence of images. Typically, food quality evaluations are performed by human graders. However, in most cases these manual evaluations are time-consuming and labor-intensive. The accuracy of the human food quality tests cannot be guaranteed. Considering that most of the food sensory parameters are based on chromatic and morphological visual impression, the set-up of an objective method using CVS is very promising. The University of Belgrade have successfully developed and implemented CVS and provided scientific evidence about its accuracy, precision and superiority over traditional food quality evaluation techniques.
As a part of the study visit an open lecture was provided by Prof. Bartosz Sołowiej – the Coordinator of the “FOOD Quality in Digital Age” network and a networking meeting with local/regional academic community and project stakeholders (incl. food producing companies, farmers, business associations, etc.) was organized.
The project is co-financed by the Governments of Czechia, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia through Visegrad Grants from International Visegrad Fund. The mission of the fund is to advance ideas for sustainable regional cooperation in Central Europe.
