Visual analysis of cake structure
Puratos develops, produces, and distributes a unique range of ingredients for bakers, pastry-chefs and chocolatiers who demand the very highest quality. Founded in Belgium in 1919, Puratos is growing rapidly with over 9000 employees in 74 countries, with consolidated turnover of over 2 billion EUR in 2021. Our passion for innovation, pioneering spirit and core value continue to propel our global ambitions. This, coupled with our commitment to our communities is what makes working at Puratos so magical.
Description of the Internship
The analysis of the porous crumb structure of bread and cake is important to assess the impact of different ingredients and processing steps on the quality of bread and cake. As visual inspection is subjective and mainly qualitative, image processing has the advantage of being objective and generating many quantitative parameters that can be used for further optimization. The challenge is however to obtain meaningful and reliable parameters by processing 2D images of slices of bread or cake.
Last year, an intern developed an algorithm and tool to analyze the structure of bread (quite a coarse structure with much air in it). This tool however does not work well for cake, that has a much finer structure. This year, we are looking for an intern well-versed in image analysis and/or Machine Learning for image analysis, to design a machine vision algorithm to quantify the crumb homogeneity and the gas cells distribution. Detecting anomalies in the cake would also be interested, but has less priority than analyzing crumb homogeneity.
Pre-requisites
- Available for min 6 weeks
- Experience in Python programming
- Affinity with computer vision techniques, AI and Machine learning
What the student will learn
- Computer vision techniques, machine learning algorithms and methods
- Company processes and operations, how to analyze user needs and translate them into technical solutions
Team and environment at the company
The student will be part of the Group R&D Baking test Center team, consisting of 11 members. This team is responsible for organizing and executing baking tests and evaluating the baked products according to well defined procedures in an accurate reliable reproducible and efficient way. The Baking test Center evaluates all bakery ingredients under development, as well as possible new alternatives, and their impact of baked goods.
Students work under the direct supervision of a mentor, who is responsible for both the scientific and the logistics aspects of the internship.
Application procedure
Send your application to Céline Petit (cpetit@puratos.com)