Fusion of sensory and mechanical testing data to define measures of snack food texture

The multivariate nature of the texture quality space of a tortilla corn chip product is investigated by fusing textural information from three diverse sources (sensory panel analysis, visual appraisal and mechanical breaking force) via a principal component analysis (PCA) model. In preparation for the PCA model, a combined wavelet transform and histogram analysis method is developed to extract texture-related features from the mechanical …