Early bread mold detection through microscopic images using convolutional neural network.

Mold on bread in the early stages of growth is difficult to discern with the naked eye. Visual inspection and expiration dates are imprecise approaches that consumers rely on to detect bread spoilage. Existing methods for detecting microbial contamination, such as inspection through a microscope and hyperspectral imaging, are unsuitable for consumer use. This paper proposes a novel early bread mold detection method through microscopic images taken using clip-on lenses. These low-cost lenses are used together with a smartphone to capture images of bread at 50× magnification. The microscopic images are automatically classified using state-of-the-art convolutional neural networks (CNNs) with transfer learning. We extensively compared image preprocessing methods, CNN models, and data augmentation methods to determine the best configuration in terms of classification accuracy. The top models achieved near-perfect scores of 0.9948 for white sandwich bread and 0.9972 for whole wheat bread.