Multi-Modal Zero-Shot Prediction of Color Trajectories in Food Drying
This work addresses the need for accurate and generalizable color trajectory prediction in food drying to improve product quality monitoring, though it is incremental as it builds on existing modeling approaches.
The paper tackled the problem of predicting color trajectories in food drying by developing a multi-modal method that integrates high-dimensional temporal color information with process parameters, achieving RMSEs of 2.12 for cookie drying and 1.29 for apple drying under unseen conditions, reducing errors by over 90% compared to baselines.
Food drying is widely used to reduce moisture content, ensure safety, and extend shelf life. Color evolution of food samples is an important indicator of product quality in food drying. Although existing studies have examined color changes under different drying conditions, current approaches primarily rely on low-dimensional color features and cannot fully capture the complex, dynamic color trajectories of food samples. Moreover, existing modeling approaches lack the ability to generalize to unseen process conditions. To address these limitations, we develop a novel multi-modal color-trajectory prediction method that integrates high-dimensional temporal color information with drying process parameters to enable accurate and data-efficient color trajectory prediction. Under unseen drying conditions, the model attains RMSEs of 2.12 for cookie drying and 1.29 for apple drying, reducing errors by over 90% compared with baseline models. These experimental results demonstrate the model's superior accuracy, robustness, and broad applicability.