Cristina Tortia | Università degli Studi di Torino (original) (raw)
Papers by Cristina Tortia
Journal of Agricultural Engineering
Traceability was introduced about twenty years ago to face the worldwide spread of food safety cr... more Traceability was introduced about twenty years ago to face the worldwide spread of food safety crises. Traceability data flow associated with each lot of food products during any production and/or delivery phases can also be used to guarantee product authenticity. For this purpose, it is necessary to protect the data from cyber intrusions and, at the same time, to guarantee the integrity of the bond between the physical product and the data. Price grading related to quality perceivable or credence attributes attracts criminals to attempt item substitution fraud. Improved track and trace technologies supported by artificial intelligence (AI) could highly enhance systems’ capability to detect authenticity violations by product substitution. This paper proposes an innovative method based on AI, to reinforce traceability systems in detecting possible counterfeiting by product substitution. It is an item-based mass balance method that analyses the congruity of the traceability data flows...
2021 IEEE International Workshop on Metrology for Agriculture and Forestry (MetroAgriFor), 2021
Nowadays, growing attention is paid by consumers to agricultural and food products that meet high... more Nowadays, growing attention is paid by consumers to agricultural and food products that meet high-quality requirements. Considering the food production activities, therefore, many efforts are aimed at developing new methods for verifying in an automatic way the correspondence between the qualitative parameters obtained and those expected. Indeed, these inspection activities are still often performed by operators, thus suffering some critical issues such as slowness, laboriousness, and the need, in most situations, of physical contact between the operator and the analysed product. These aspects can undermine the economy, the extensiveness and, sometimes, the success of such operations. Non-Destructive Systems (NDS), which are automatic or semi-automatic processes used for inspection, allow overcoming these limitations, providing a large amount of information about the analysed products. In this work, an innovative NDS for the inspection of baked goods is presented, which is based on a cost-effective depth camera. The system was specifically conceived to identify products with morphological defects due to unsuitable leavening or baking. Three product categories were considered in the experimental campaign: first choice, second choice, and non-compliant products. A set of 8 indices were computed by processing the 3D point cloud model provided by the system, in order to determine the optimal k-mean based classifier. The accuracy, obtained processing 24 items, was 83%, with a defects underestimation error lower than 4% and an overestimation error of 12%. The system was proved to be reliable since it does not classify any unsuitable product as compliant with company requirements.
Precision agriculture ’21, 2021
Chemical engineering transactions, 2015
The appropriate amount of antioxidant compounds added in frozen light-flesh cut fruit production ... more The appropriate amount of antioxidant compounds added in frozen light-flesh cut fruit production process is usually estimate evaluating colour changes, in particular by measuring the minimum time before browning phenomena occur. This parameter is assessed by visual inspections performed by trained operators: a time consuming and strongly subjective procedure. The development of a Computer Vision System (CVS) for quality control in frozen fruit slice is presented in this paper. An algorithm to detect and measure browned area on fruit slices was implemented in order to describe colour changes evolution. The red component of browned areas is emphasized by an adequate linear combination of RGB colour channels of digital images, and an entropy-based automatic segmentation is applied to the obtained high contrast grey-scale image. This approach is not based on colour measurement of samples by the CVS, avoiding the colour calibration phase. Antioxidant solutions with different concentratio...
Precision viticulture has been assumed as an essential approach to optimise crop-managing practic... more Precision viticulture has been assumed as an essential approach to optimise crop-managing practices and to improve the quality of food products. To deploy proper site-specific management, addressing the intrinsic variability within a vineyard or a parcel, reliable methods for features extraction and mapping of crops must be developed. The introduction in agriculture of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV), equipped with sensors able to acquire fields planar images at several wavelengths, makes available huge amount of data with high-resolution, in terms of both spatial and temporal dimension. Recently, in addition to well-known 2D mosaicked images, innovative features leaded by modern photogrammetry allowed accurate three-dimensional models of crops (ex. 3D point cloud datasets) to be generated. The approach presented in this work is aimed at defining enhanced crop descriptors by exploiting information provided by both 2D and 3D crop models. Crucial phases of the procedure are the proper m...
Radio frequency identification (RFID) technology could deserve an important role in food products... more Radio frequency identification (RFID) technology could deserve an important role in food products automatic identification. The massive introduction of RFID tracking in food factories has been limited as technical challenges have to be overcome. Tag reading performances are affected by many factors, as product composition, packaging materials and some peculiarities of the production environment, which dramatically reduce RF identification reliability. This paper analyses the effect on RFID tag readability when in proximity of aqueous solutions of different chemical compounds chosen among molecules which are frequently contained in food or beverage (citric acid, sodium chloride, sucrose). The effect of the concentration was evaluated measuring, in standardized conditions, the minimum power (Pmin) to be delivered to different commercial UHF passive tags for their activation and effective identification by a RFID UHF (Ultra High Frequency) test bench system.
Chemical engineering transactions, 2017
The radio frequency identification (RFID) of food items improves production process efficiency as... more The radio frequency identification (RFID) of food items improves production process efficiency as well as optimises the management of the monitoring and the logistics along the production chain (Barge et al., 2014). Moreover, interest in UHF RFID tags adoption is growing in particular applications such as anti-counterfeiting systems. The readability of passive UHF RFID tags is well known to be critical when applied to products at high water content. Nevertheless, the effect on readability of solutions of water and other organic (e.g. ethanol, sugars, organic acids) or inorganic (salts) compounds, which are typical of food and beverage composition, has not yet been studied. Furthermore, as in the case of beverages that must be chilled for their conservation (i.e. fruit juice, fresh milk and other pasteurised beverages), the temperature can compromise tag readability. RFID systems efficiency may also be affected by tag-to-reader antenna misalignment, which often occurs for cylindrical...
Recent European Community directives have increasingly limited use of pesticides and chemical fum... more Recent European Community directives have increasingly limited use of pesticides and chemical fumigants, such as methyl bromide, to counteract soilborne pathogens. An efficient option to these discouraged chemical treatments can be the adoption of disease resistant grafted plants (as e.g. tomatoes or peppers), even if this technique is labour consuming and involves tedious repetitive actions. These aspects encourage the development of automated machines, in order to increase the productivity and the rooting success rate and to reduce costs, allowing grafting to be more economically sustainable. The design and implementation of the supplying and sorting system of a new prototype of a grafting machine is presented in this paper. Target of developing a mechanical structure simplest and cheapest possible was achieved basing the supplying system on a passive linear guide with six singleaxis independent robot modules, relying on automation and control for the fulfilment of performance spe...
Chemical engineering transactions, 2017
Performance Optimization of Neural-Network Based Colour Measurement Tools for Food Applications P... more Performance Optimization of Neural-Network Based Colour Measurement Tools for Food Applications Paolo Barge, Lorenzo Comba, Paolo Gay, Davide Ricauda Aimonino, Cristina Tortia*, Nahid Aghilinategh, Mohammad Jafar Dalvand DI.S.A.F.A. – Università degli Studi di Torino, 2 Largo Paolo Braccini, 10095 Grugliasco (TO), Italy DENERG – Politecnico di Torino, 24 Corso Duca degli Abruzzi, 10129 Torino, Italy D.A.M.E. University of Tehran, Karaj, Iran cristina.tortia@unito.it
2019 IEEE International Workshop on Metrology for Agriculture and Forestry (MetroAgriFor), 2019
Addressing the intrinsic variability within vineyards is a key factor to perform precision viticu... more Addressing the intrinsic variability within vineyards is a key factor to perform precision viticulture management. To this aim, new and more reliable methods for vineyard monitoring purposes must be defined. The introduction of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) airborne sensors makes available a considerable amount of data with very high resolution, in terms of both spatial and temporal dimension. In this work, a data fusion approach for vigour characterization in vineyards is presented, which exploits the information provided by 2D multispectral aerial imagery, 3D point cloud crop models and aerial thermal imagery. A crucial phase of the procedure is the proper management of data provided by several sources, to achieve high consistency of the obtained huge dataset. The enhanced effectiveness of the proposed method to classify vines in different vigour classes exploiting multi source data was proved by an experimental campaign, considering 30 portions of vine rows, each made by 8 vines. Results showed that the error of the discriminant analysis using data fusion reach an improvement ranging from 67% to 90% with respect to a single data source, with a misclassification error rate of 3%.
Sensors, 2020
Digitalised supply-chain traceability systems can offer wide prospects both for improving safety ... more Digitalised supply-chain traceability systems can offer wide prospects both for improving safety as well as enhancing perceived quality. However, the coupling between physical goods and information is often difficult for agri-food items. A solution could be the use of RFID (Radio Frequency IDentification) systems. Due to its wide reading range, Ultra-High Frequency (UHF) technology is already widely used in logistics and warehousing, mostly for the identification of batches of items. A growing interest is also emerging in Near Field Communication (NFC), as several smartphones embed an integrated NFC antenna. This paper deals with the automatic identification of meat products at item level, proposing and evaluating the adoption of different RFID technologies. Different UHF and NFC solutions are proposed, which benchmark tag performances in different configurations, including four meat types (fatty beef, lean beef, chicken and pork), by using a specifically designed test bench. As avo...
Advances in Food Traceability Techniques and Technologies, 2016
Abstract Challenges and opportunities of Radio-Frequency Identification (RFID) adoption for food ... more Abstract Challenges and opportunities of Radio-Frequency Identification (RFID) adoption for food traceability are treated and evaluated considering, in food supply chains, the different areas (production process, logistics, and distribution) and applications (process, warehouse and retail management, cold chain monitoring, logistic, intelligent packaging, and anticounterfeit). The options offered by RFID systems at different frequencies are presented, compared, and discussed, considering the difficulties and constraints which limit the large-scale adoption in the food sector. Aspects which should be carefully evaluated when designing traceability frameworks considering traceable unit size, reading system configuration in static and dynamic conditions, orientation, tag size, and tag-to-tag collision problem are covered. Examples of RFID implementations in a particular food supply chain, such as meat, cheese, fish, food and vegetables, and plants are reported.
Bochtis/Supply Chain Management for Sustainable Food Networks, 2016
A system for radio frequency identification (RFID) for the traceability of PDO (Protected Designa... more A system for radio frequency identification (RFID) for the traceability of PDO (Protected Designation of Origin) and PGI (Protected Geographical Indication) lamb meat has been proposed, working in a collaborative network in which each stakeholder contributes in collecting information through the whole supply chain. A dual band LF/UHF system for electronic identification was prototyped and tested. Future perspectives of operating in the UHF band in animal identification were analysed
Readability of ultra-high frequency (UHF) passive tag applied on food depends on many factors, su... more Readability of ultra-high frequency (UHF) passive tag applied on food depends on many factors, such as tag features (inlay design, chip type), reader antenna polarization, tag-to-reader antenna distance and orientation, reader transmitter power output, environmental characteristics, packaging material, as well as product composition. In a real production context, apart the environmental interference which can affect RF wave propagation, both product and packaging characteristics (shape, material, composition) must be considered. The goal of this work is to identify technological features and limits of UHF RFID systems for the electronic identification of food products in different kind of packaging. The effects of different factors as food product, packaging material and tag type were considered for UHF transponder readability evaluation. At this purpose, different tag models and food product categories were subjected to performance analysis comparing, in different item positioning,...
Journal of Agricultural Engineering
Traceability was introduced about twenty years ago to face the worldwide spread of food safety cr... more Traceability was introduced about twenty years ago to face the worldwide spread of food safety crises. Traceability data flow associated with each lot of food products during any production and/or delivery phases can also be used to guarantee product authenticity. For this purpose, it is necessary to protect the data from cyber intrusions and, at the same time, to guarantee the integrity of the bond between the physical product and the data. Price grading related to quality perceivable or credence attributes attracts criminals to attempt item substitution fraud. Improved track and trace technologies supported by artificial intelligence (AI) could highly enhance systems’ capability to detect authenticity violations by product substitution. This paper proposes an innovative method based on AI, to reinforce traceability systems in detecting possible counterfeiting by product substitution. It is an item-based mass balance method that analyses the congruity of the traceability data flows...
2021 IEEE International Workshop on Metrology for Agriculture and Forestry (MetroAgriFor), 2021
Nowadays, growing attention is paid by consumers to agricultural and food products that meet high... more Nowadays, growing attention is paid by consumers to agricultural and food products that meet high-quality requirements. Considering the food production activities, therefore, many efforts are aimed at developing new methods for verifying in an automatic way the correspondence between the qualitative parameters obtained and those expected. Indeed, these inspection activities are still often performed by operators, thus suffering some critical issues such as slowness, laboriousness, and the need, in most situations, of physical contact between the operator and the analysed product. These aspects can undermine the economy, the extensiveness and, sometimes, the success of such operations. Non-Destructive Systems (NDS), which are automatic or semi-automatic processes used for inspection, allow overcoming these limitations, providing a large amount of information about the analysed products. In this work, an innovative NDS for the inspection of baked goods is presented, which is based on a cost-effective depth camera. The system was specifically conceived to identify products with morphological defects due to unsuitable leavening or baking. Three product categories were considered in the experimental campaign: first choice, second choice, and non-compliant products. A set of 8 indices were computed by processing the 3D point cloud model provided by the system, in order to determine the optimal k-mean based classifier. The accuracy, obtained processing 24 items, was 83%, with a defects underestimation error lower than 4% and an overestimation error of 12%. The system was proved to be reliable since it does not classify any unsuitable product as compliant with company requirements.
Precision agriculture ’21, 2021
Chemical engineering transactions, 2015
The appropriate amount of antioxidant compounds added in frozen light-flesh cut fruit production ... more The appropriate amount of antioxidant compounds added in frozen light-flesh cut fruit production process is usually estimate evaluating colour changes, in particular by measuring the minimum time before browning phenomena occur. This parameter is assessed by visual inspections performed by trained operators: a time consuming and strongly subjective procedure. The development of a Computer Vision System (CVS) for quality control in frozen fruit slice is presented in this paper. An algorithm to detect and measure browned area on fruit slices was implemented in order to describe colour changes evolution. The red component of browned areas is emphasized by an adequate linear combination of RGB colour channels of digital images, and an entropy-based automatic segmentation is applied to the obtained high contrast grey-scale image. This approach is not based on colour measurement of samples by the CVS, avoiding the colour calibration phase. Antioxidant solutions with different concentratio...
Precision viticulture has been assumed as an essential approach to optimise crop-managing practic... more Precision viticulture has been assumed as an essential approach to optimise crop-managing practices and to improve the quality of food products. To deploy proper site-specific management, addressing the intrinsic variability within a vineyard or a parcel, reliable methods for features extraction and mapping of crops must be developed. The introduction in agriculture of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV), equipped with sensors able to acquire fields planar images at several wavelengths, makes available huge amount of data with high-resolution, in terms of both spatial and temporal dimension. Recently, in addition to well-known 2D mosaicked images, innovative features leaded by modern photogrammetry allowed accurate three-dimensional models of crops (ex. 3D point cloud datasets) to be generated. The approach presented in this work is aimed at defining enhanced crop descriptors by exploiting information provided by both 2D and 3D crop models. Crucial phases of the procedure are the proper m...
Radio frequency identification (RFID) technology could deserve an important role in food products... more Radio frequency identification (RFID) technology could deserve an important role in food products automatic identification. The massive introduction of RFID tracking in food factories has been limited as technical challenges have to be overcome. Tag reading performances are affected by many factors, as product composition, packaging materials and some peculiarities of the production environment, which dramatically reduce RF identification reliability. This paper analyses the effect on RFID tag readability when in proximity of aqueous solutions of different chemical compounds chosen among molecules which are frequently contained in food or beverage (citric acid, sodium chloride, sucrose). The effect of the concentration was evaluated measuring, in standardized conditions, the minimum power (Pmin) to be delivered to different commercial UHF passive tags for their activation and effective identification by a RFID UHF (Ultra High Frequency) test bench system.
Chemical engineering transactions, 2017
The radio frequency identification (RFID) of food items improves production process efficiency as... more The radio frequency identification (RFID) of food items improves production process efficiency as well as optimises the management of the monitoring and the logistics along the production chain (Barge et al., 2014). Moreover, interest in UHF RFID tags adoption is growing in particular applications such as anti-counterfeiting systems. The readability of passive UHF RFID tags is well known to be critical when applied to products at high water content. Nevertheless, the effect on readability of solutions of water and other organic (e.g. ethanol, sugars, organic acids) or inorganic (salts) compounds, which are typical of food and beverage composition, has not yet been studied. Furthermore, as in the case of beverages that must be chilled for their conservation (i.e. fruit juice, fresh milk and other pasteurised beverages), the temperature can compromise tag readability. RFID systems efficiency may also be affected by tag-to-reader antenna misalignment, which often occurs for cylindrical...
Recent European Community directives have increasingly limited use of pesticides and chemical fum... more Recent European Community directives have increasingly limited use of pesticides and chemical fumigants, such as methyl bromide, to counteract soilborne pathogens. An efficient option to these discouraged chemical treatments can be the adoption of disease resistant grafted plants (as e.g. tomatoes or peppers), even if this technique is labour consuming and involves tedious repetitive actions. These aspects encourage the development of automated machines, in order to increase the productivity and the rooting success rate and to reduce costs, allowing grafting to be more economically sustainable. The design and implementation of the supplying and sorting system of a new prototype of a grafting machine is presented in this paper. Target of developing a mechanical structure simplest and cheapest possible was achieved basing the supplying system on a passive linear guide with six singleaxis independent robot modules, relying on automation and control for the fulfilment of performance spe...
Chemical engineering transactions, 2017
Performance Optimization of Neural-Network Based Colour Measurement Tools for Food Applications P... more Performance Optimization of Neural-Network Based Colour Measurement Tools for Food Applications Paolo Barge, Lorenzo Comba, Paolo Gay, Davide Ricauda Aimonino, Cristina Tortia*, Nahid Aghilinategh, Mohammad Jafar Dalvand DI.S.A.F.A. – Università degli Studi di Torino, 2 Largo Paolo Braccini, 10095 Grugliasco (TO), Italy DENERG – Politecnico di Torino, 24 Corso Duca degli Abruzzi, 10129 Torino, Italy D.A.M.E. University of Tehran, Karaj, Iran cristina.tortia@unito.it
2019 IEEE International Workshop on Metrology for Agriculture and Forestry (MetroAgriFor), 2019
Addressing the intrinsic variability within vineyards is a key factor to perform precision viticu... more Addressing the intrinsic variability within vineyards is a key factor to perform precision viticulture management. To this aim, new and more reliable methods for vineyard monitoring purposes must be defined. The introduction of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) airborne sensors makes available a considerable amount of data with very high resolution, in terms of both spatial and temporal dimension. In this work, a data fusion approach for vigour characterization in vineyards is presented, which exploits the information provided by 2D multispectral aerial imagery, 3D point cloud crop models and aerial thermal imagery. A crucial phase of the procedure is the proper management of data provided by several sources, to achieve high consistency of the obtained huge dataset. The enhanced effectiveness of the proposed method to classify vines in different vigour classes exploiting multi source data was proved by an experimental campaign, considering 30 portions of vine rows, each made by 8 vines. Results showed that the error of the discriminant analysis using data fusion reach an improvement ranging from 67% to 90% with respect to a single data source, with a misclassification error rate of 3%.
Sensors, 2020
Digitalised supply-chain traceability systems can offer wide prospects both for improving safety ... more Digitalised supply-chain traceability systems can offer wide prospects both for improving safety as well as enhancing perceived quality. However, the coupling between physical goods and information is often difficult for agri-food items. A solution could be the use of RFID (Radio Frequency IDentification) systems. Due to its wide reading range, Ultra-High Frequency (UHF) technology is already widely used in logistics and warehousing, mostly for the identification of batches of items. A growing interest is also emerging in Near Field Communication (NFC), as several smartphones embed an integrated NFC antenna. This paper deals with the automatic identification of meat products at item level, proposing and evaluating the adoption of different RFID technologies. Different UHF and NFC solutions are proposed, which benchmark tag performances in different configurations, including four meat types (fatty beef, lean beef, chicken and pork), by using a specifically designed test bench. As avo...
Advances in Food Traceability Techniques and Technologies, 2016
Abstract Challenges and opportunities of Radio-Frequency Identification (RFID) adoption for food ... more Abstract Challenges and opportunities of Radio-Frequency Identification (RFID) adoption for food traceability are treated and evaluated considering, in food supply chains, the different areas (production process, logistics, and distribution) and applications (process, warehouse and retail management, cold chain monitoring, logistic, intelligent packaging, and anticounterfeit). The options offered by RFID systems at different frequencies are presented, compared, and discussed, considering the difficulties and constraints which limit the large-scale adoption in the food sector. Aspects which should be carefully evaluated when designing traceability frameworks considering traceable unit size, reading system configuration in static and dynamic conditions, orientation, tag size, and tag-to-tag collision problem are covered. Examples of RFID implementations in a particular food supply chain, such as meat, cheese, fish, food and vegetables, and plants are reported.
Bochtis/Supply Chain Management for Sustainable Food Networks, 2016
A system for radio frequency identification (RFID) for the traceability of PDO (Protected Designa... more A system for radio frequency identification (RFID) for the traceability of PDO (Protected Designation of Origin) and PGI (Protected Geographical Indication) lamb meat has been proposed, working in a collaborative network in which each stakeholder contributes in collecting information through the whole supply chain. A dual band LF/UHF system for electronic identification was prototyped and tested. Future perspectives of operating in the UHF band in animal identification were analysed
Readability of ultra-high frequency (UHF) passive tag applied on food depends on many factors, su... more Readability of ultra-high frequency (UHF) passive tag applied on food depends on many factors, such as tag features (inlay design, chip type), reader antenna polarization, tag-to-reader antenna distance and orientation, reader transmitter power output, environmental characteristics, packaging material, as well as product composition. In a real production context, apart the environmental interference which can affect RF wave propagation, both product and packaging characteristics (shape, material, composition) must be considered. The goal of this work is to identify technological features and limits of UHF RFID systems for the electronic identification of food products in different kind of packaging. The effects of different factors as food product, packaging material and tag type were considered for UHF transponder readability evaluation. At this purpose, different tag models and food product categories were subjected to performance analysis comparing, in different item positioning,...