Name
Tech. Session X - 86
Date & Time
Thursday, June 26, 2025, 9:00 AM - 9:25 AM
Description

Fruit drying is widely used in food manufacturing to reduce product moisture, ensure product safety, and extend product shelf life. Accurately predicting final moisture content (MC) is critically needed for quality control of drying processes. State-of-the-art methods can build deterministic relationships between process parameters and MC, but cannot adequately account for inherent process variabilities that are ubiquitous in fruit drying. To address this gap, this paper presents a novel multi-modal data fusion framework to effectively fuse tabular data (process parameters) and high-dimensional image data (images of dried apple slices), thereby enabling accurate MC prediction. The proposed modeling architecture permits flexible adjustment of information portion from tabular and image data modalities. Experimental validation shows that the multi-modal approach improves predictive accuracy substantially compared to state-of-the-art methods. The proposed method reduces root-mean-squared errors by 19.3%, 24.2%, and 15.2% over tabular-only, image-only, and standard tabular-image fusion models, respectively. Furthermore, it is demonstrated that our method is robust in varied tabular-image ratios and capable of effectively capturing inherent small-scale process variabilities. The proposed framework is extensible to a variety of other drying technologies.

Location Name
Crepe Myrtle
Full Address
Hyatt Regency
220 N Main St
Greenville, SC 29601
United States
Session Type
Technical Session
Paper #
NAMRC 86
Author List
Yi-Ping Chen, Vispi Karkaria, Ying-Kuan Tsai, Faith Rolark, Daniel Quispe, Robert Gao, Jian Cao and Wei Chen
Paper Title
Real-Time Decision-Making for Digital Twin in Additive Manufacturing with Model Predictive Control using Time-Series Deep Neural Networks
Presenter Name
Yi-Ping Chen
Session Chair
Debejyo Chakraborty, Rujing Zha
Presenter Email
chenyp@u.northwestern.edu