Multi-Modal Zero-Shot Prediction of Color Trajectories in Food Drying

TL;DR

This paper introduces a multi-modal approach for predicting the complex color trajectories of food during drying, improving accuracy and generalization to unseen conditions by integrating high-dimensional temporal color data with process parameters.

Contribution

The study presents a novel multi-modal model that effectively captures dynamic color changes and generalizes to new drying conditions, surpassing existing low-dimensional methods.

Findings

Achieved RMSE of 2.12 for cookie drying and 1.29 for apple drying.

Reduced prediction errors by over 90% compared to baseline models.

Demonstrated superior accuracy and robustness across different food drying scenarios.

Abstract

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.