Indians and Indian scientists are known for numerous highly innovative and successful creations in various domains. There is no dearth of examples in India where ordinary people, using some common sense and exploratory talent have come up with excellent solutions to the problems at hand. They never let their indomitable spirit be challenged by a lack of opportunity or money. They achieved what they wanted to make their life less burdensome through their innovative minds. A few examples can be seen in the pictures above.
Human beings have fve senses, namely sight (vision), hearing (audition), taste (gustation), smell (olfaction), and touch (somatic sensation). Mimicking the human senses has been drawing the attention of scientists and technologists for more than a decade. By intelligent integration of multitudes of technologies like sensors, microelectronics and advanced soft computing, the human sensing system has been successfully mimicked by such new techniques called an electronic nose, vision, and tongue. An electronic nose is a device that successfully mimics the human perception of olfaction. Electronic vision comprises the techniques related to digital camera-based image capturing followed by self-learning type image processing algorithms for classification and quantification of the features of a particular operational domain. E-Tongue (Electronic Tongue) is a taste-sensing system that provides unbiased sensory analysis to evaluate taste using sensors that mimic the human tongue. However, the essence of such research and development efforts is centred around the development of customized electronic nose, vision, and tongue solutions specific to individual applications. In fact, current research trends clearly indicate the fact that a machine olfaction, gestation, and vision system as versatile, universal, and broadband as a human nose, tongue and vision may not be feasible in the decades to come. But application-specific solutions may be demonstrated and commercialized at highly affordable prices by modulating sensor design and fine-tuning the soft computing solutions in the case of electronic nose, tongue, and vision systems. To this end, several applications for quality estimation of food and agro products have already been developed by the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC).
Electronic Nose
Electronic Nose is a smart instrument that is designed to detect and discriminate among complex odours using an array of sensors. The array of sensors consists of a few broadly tuned (non-specifc) sensors that are treated with a variety of odour-sensitive biological or chemical materials. An odour stimulus generates a characteristic fngerprint from this array of sensors. Patterns or fngerprints from known odours are used to construct a database and train a pattern recognition system so that unknown odours can subsequently be classifed and/or identifed.
Electronic Tongue
Taste is fundamentally comprised of four basic qualities such as saltiness which is mainly produced by sodium chloride, potassium nitrate, and potassium chloride etc; sourness which is produced by hydrogen ions of hydrochloric acid, sulphuric acid, glacial acetic acid etc; sweetness due to sucrose, glucose, fructose, glycine etc.;
bitterness which is produced by magnesium chloride, quinine, caffeine, picric acid etc. But recently, a ffth taste, savoury (or umami), has been proposed by many authorities associated with this feld and is produced by monosodium glutamate, disodium inosinate disodium guanylate etc. To humans, the sensation of favour is due to three main chemoreceptor systems. These are gustation (sense of taste by the tongue), olfaction (sense of smell by nose) and trigeminal (sense of irritation). The electrode array used in the electronic tongue works in a similar process: like human receptors (but nowhere near their effciency and wide range), each electrode has a spectrum of reactions different from the other. The information given by each electrode is complementary and the combination of all electrodes generates a unique fngerprint. The electronic tongue receives information from chemicals through an electrode array and sends it to a pattern recognition system. The result is the detection of the tastes that compose the human palate.
Electronic Vision for the Quality Estimation of Food and Agro Produce
C-DAC has developed several products for the quality evaluation of agriculture and sericulture products using digital image analysis technology. The developed products consist of low-cost digital cameras with specially designed sample holding arrangements under controlled illumination conditions and use advanced image analysis for rapid quality characterization of food and agro produce based on physical properties like size, colour, shape, texture etc. A novel attempt has been made to address the above-mentioned problems using electronic vision technology, backed up by data analysis algorithms that correlate the results with human perception.
The main objective of these developments was to minimize human errors during quality inspection which involves subjectivity, non- repeatability etc.
There are many such innovative ideas that are being given shape by the agencies under Govt. of India. This is just a glimpse of those. There are centers established for training artisans and weavers on Adobe Photoshop based on simple overlays which allow them to create their own designs and motifs by treating the entire worksheet as graph paper. Photographs of flowers, birds etc. can also be overlaid onto this sheet to create designs and motifs. This is a great step forward to preserving Indian heritage and skill in traditional designs at an affordable cost.
Ours is a great country with innovation at the core of each citizen. Be it the use of plastic bottles to make boats, motorbikes to substitute tractor engines or using CDs to create desktop stationery holders, there is an innovator in each one of us. So let it come out and make this world a much better place to live in.
