Intelligent sensory evaluation: Concepts, implementations, and applications

Sensory evaluation has been widely applied in different industrial fields especially for quality inspection, product design and marketing. Classically, factorial multivariate methods are the only tool for analyzing and modeling sensory data provided by experts, panelists or consumers. These methods are efficient for solving some problems but sometimes cause important information lost. In this situation, new methods based on intelligent techniques such as fuzzy logic, neural networks, data aggregation, classification, clustering have been applied for solving uncertainty and imprecision related to sensory evaluation. These new methods can be used together with the classical ones in a complementary way for obtaining relevant information from sensory data. This paper outlines the general background of sensory evaluation and the corresponding industrial interests and explicitly indicates some orientations for further development by IT researchers.