Hyperspectral imaging applied to complex particulate solids systems

HyperSpectral Imaging (HSI) is based on the utilization of an integrated hardware and software (HW&SW) platform embedding conventional imaging and spectroscopy to attain both spatial and spectral information from an object. Although HSI was originally developed for remote sensing, it has recently emerged as a powerful process analytical tool, for non-destructive analysis, in many research and industrial sectors. The possibility to apply on-line HSI based techniques in order to identify and quantify specific particulate solid system characteristics is presented and critically evaluated. The originally developed HSI based logics can be profitably applied in order to develop fast, reliable and low-cost strategies for: i) quality control of particulate products that must comply with specific chemical, physical and biological constraints, ii) performance evaluation of manufacturing strategies related to processing chains and/or real-time tuning of operative variables and iii) classification-sorting actions addressed to recognize and separate different particulate solid products. Case studies, related to recent advances in the application of HSI to different industrial sectors, as agriculture, food, pharmaceuticals, solid waste handling and recycling, etc. and addressed to specific goals as contaminant detection, defect identification, constituent analysis and quality evaluation are described, according to authors' originally developed application.