Journal of Food Engineering 61 (2004) 2735 www.elsevier.

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Meat quality evaluation by computer vision

Jinglu Tan
*
Department of Biological Engineering, University of Missouri, Columbia, MO 65211-0001, USA Received 18 April 2002; accepted 2 May 2003

Abstract Applying computer vision in meat quality evaluation has been an active area of research in recent years. Various studies have addressed issues from basic technique development to applications. This paper summarizes the main results from a number of recent application studies, which include characterization of quality attributes such as color, marbling, maturity and texture; prediction of sensory scores and grades; and prediction of cooked-meat tenderness. The promise of computer vision for objective meat quality evaluation is demonstrated and the remaining challenges are discussed. 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Keywords: Image processing; Meat grading; Tenderness

1. Introduction The existing methods for meat quality (palatability) grading heavily rely on subjective visual appraisal of certain carcass characteristics. The ocial USDA (US Department of Agriculture) beef quality grading system consists of three visually assessed attributes: abundance of marbling (intra-muscular fat), muscle color, and skeletal maturity. An ocial pork grading system does not yet exist, but color is considered an important quality attribute because it inuences consumers in their product selection. While visual appraisal has been serving the industry for decades, it has some major drawbacks. Although the graders are professionally trained, inconsistencies and variations are intrinsic of subjective evaluations (Cross, Gilliland, Durland, & Seideman, 1983). This has seriously limited the ability of the meat industry to provide consumers with products of consistent quality. Furthermore, the grades have limited predictive power of the eating quality. Research has shown that marbling and color characteristics, and thereby, the nal grade, only explain a rather low percentage of the variations in important palatability measures such as tenderness (Li, Tan, Martz, & Heymann, 1999; Li, Tan, & Shatadal, 2001).
Corresponding author. Tel.: +1-573-882-7778; fax: +1-573-8845650. E-mail address: tanj@missouri.edu (J. Tan). 0260-8774/$ - see front matter 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/S0260-8774(03)00185-7
*

Objective measures of beef quality have been a longtime desire of the industry and there have been many research eorts in developing instruments. One popular, and obvious, approach has been to measure the mechanical properties as indicators of tenderness. A number of devices have appeared. The most well known one may be the WarnerBratzler shear force instrument. The shear strength of cooked meat is correlated with sensory tenderness scores (Shackelford, Wheeler, & Koohmaraie, 1995). This method, however, is not practical for commercial fresh-meat grading. Computer vision has been recognized as the most promising approach to objective assessment of meat quality from fresh-meat characteristics. Research in this area began in the early 80s. Lenhert and Gilliland (1985) describe the design of a black-and-white (B/W) imaging system for lean yield estimation. Cross et al. (1983) and Wassenberg, Allen, and Kemp (1986) report application results of the system. Beef quality assessment by image processing started with the work by Chen, McDonald, and Crouse (1989) to quantify the marbling area percentage in six standard USDA marbling photographs. McDonald and Chen (1990a, 1990b) used morphological operations to separate connected muscle tissues from the longissimus dorsi (LD) muscle. A Boolean random set model was proposed to describe the spatial marbling distribution (McDonald & Chen, 1992) but it did not signicantly improve marbling score prediction over using only the marbling area (McDonald & Chen, 1991). To separate lean from fat in B/W steak images, Chen,

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Nguyen, and Park (1995) suggested using the sixth moment as a thresholding criterion. To develop a computer vision system for objective meat grading, several steps must be completed. While the existing human grading system has many weaknesses, any new system designed as a replacement must be compared against the human system before the new system is accepted. Since the existing system is dened in terms of qualitative subjective assessments, the quantitative characteristics that contribute to the human grading are not always obvious. It is therefore necessary to search for image features that are related to human scores for marbling abundance, muscle color and maturity; and eventually, the USDA grades. Moreover, to improve the usefulness of the grading system, new instrumentally measurable characteristics are needed to enhance the power of the grades in predicting the eating quality such as tenderness. This paper attempts to show where we stand towards computer vision-based meat grading by summarizing some recent results from work performed at the University of Missouri and discussing some remaining challenges. This will shed light on how successful we have been in characterizing the traditional quality attributes, predicting ocial grades, and nding computable features for tenderness prediction. The diculties discussed will point to some future directions of research.

and 9moderately abundant. The panel averages were used as the sensory scores. Images were acquired while the sensory evaluations were proceeding. A color imaging system was used to capture sample images. The illumination and camera settings were selected so that the image resolution was appropriate for revealing the small marbling ecks. The steak images were subjected to several steps of processing: ltering, background removal, segmentation of fat from muscles, isolation of the LD muscle, and segmentation of marbling from the LD muscle. Details of the segmentation algorithms developed and used can be found in Gao, Tan, and Gerrard (1995), Lu and Tan (1998), and Lu (2002). Fig. 1 shows an original image and the segmented LD muscle. The holes in the LD muscle give an image of the marbling ecks (not shown). From the segmented LD muscle and marbling images, image features relating to muscle color and marbling abundance were extracted. The LD muscle color was characterized with the means (lR , lG and lB ) and standard deviations (rR , rG and rB ) of the red, green and blue color functions.

2. Characterizing USDA quality attributes Meat images were processed to characterize the quality attributes dened in the USDA beef grading system. Color image features were extracted to predict human scores of color, marbling and maturity. 2.1. Color and marbling Sixty wholesale beef ribs of varying color and degree of marbling were acquired from a local supplier. Fivecm-thick slices were taken from the ribs. Each slice was then cut into two 2.5-cm-thick steaks. The two freshly cut surfaces, mirror images of each other, were used for analysis, one for image capture and the other for sensory analysis. A 10-member panel was assembled and trained to evaluate color and marbling of beefsteaks. Muscle color was evaluated according to a beef color guide in an 8point scale: 1bleached red, 2very light cherry red, 3moderately light cherry red, 4cherry red, 5 slightly dark red, 6moderately dark red, 7dark red, and 8very dark red. Marbling was rated according to the USDA marbling scorecards in a 9-point scale: 1 devoid, 2practically devoid, 3traces, 4slight, 5 small, 6modest, 7moderate, 8slightly abundant,

Fig. 1. Example beef image. Upper: original. Lower: segmented LD muscle. The holes in the LD muscle give the marbling image.

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Features representing the amount and the spatial distribution of marbling were extracted from labeled marbling images (Gerrard, Gao, & Tan, 1996). The size of each marbling eck was calculated. To take into account the eects of eck size, the marbling ecks were classied into the following three size categories: A1 : <2.7 mm2 , A2 : 2.721.4 mm2 , and A3 : >21.4 mm2 . The following marbling features were then computed to measure marbling abundance: Dci Dai Dc Da count of marbling ecks in size category Ai per unit ribeye area, marbling area in size category Ai per unit ribeye area, count of all marbling ecks per unit ribeye area, and total marbling area per unit ribeye area.

Dc and Da dene two marbling densities: Dc is a count density and Da is an area density. Dci and Dai represent the densities for each eck size category. The two densities describe marbling abundance from dierent perspectives. To characterize the spatial distribution of marbling, a ribeye image was divided into 5.5-cm2 sub-regions. Dc and Da were computed for each sub-region. The variations in these localized densities would indicate the spatial distribution of marbling over the LD. The following statistics were computed from these densities as image features: rDc , rDa MDc , MDa standard deviations of the count and area densities, and third moments of count and area densities about mean.

Statistical analysis was conducted. The SAS Backward Elimination procedure (SAS, 1996) was used to select image features signicant for sensory score prediction. For color scores, two image features (lR and lG ) were signicant. For marbling scores, ve image features (lR ; Dc1 ; Da1 ; Da3 and Da ) were useful. The R2 values of regression were 0.86 for color and 0.84 for marbling, indicating that the features were useful in explaining the variations in sensory scores. The means of red and green (lR and lG ) were signicant for color prediction but lB was not. This indicates that, while all three color components varied, the green component did not aect the judges scoring. The fact that lR was signicant in marbling prediction shows that the judges opinions were inuenced by the lean color. Both the count and area densities of small mar-

bling ecks (Dc1 and Da1 ) inuenced the sensory scores as expected. The area density of large ecks Da3 being signicant indicated that the presence of a few large marbling ecks aected the sensory scoring although the judges were instructed not to put more weight on larger ecks. The global marbling area density Da was inuential on the scoring. The image features characterizing the spatial variation of marbling were not signicant in the regression. This agrees with McDonald and Chen (1992) that information on the spatial distribution of marbling did not correlate signicantly with marbling scores. Since the sensory scores were imprecise in nature, the data were also analyzed by using fuzzy set and neural network techniques (Tan, Gao, & Gerrard, 1998). The sensory scales were described as fuzzy sets, sensory attributes as fuzzy variables, and sensory responses as sample membership grades. Multi-judge responses were formulated as a fuzzy membership vector or fuzzy histogram of response, which gave an overall panel response free of unveriable assumptions implied in conventional approaches. Neural networks were used to predict the sensory responses in their naturally fuzzy and complex form from the image features selected by backward elimination. A maximum method of defuzzication was employed to give a crisp grade of majority opinion. The fuzzy set and neural network method classied color and marbling of a set of samples 100% correctly. This further veried the usefulness of the image features extracted. In addition to beef color and marbling, fresh pork color was also evaluated by image processing (Lu, Tan, & Gerrard, 1997; Lu, Tan, Shatadal, & Gerrard, 2000). Since consumers pay attention to pork color during product selection, it is of interest to know if human responses to pork color can be predicted by image processing. Forty-four pork loins were randomly picked and cut at the 10th rib. The muscle color was subjected to evaluation by a seven-member sensory panel trained according to procedures described in the American Meat Science Association guidelines (AMSA, 1991). The color scale used was: 1pale-purplish gray, 2 grayish pink, 3reddish pink, 4purplish red, and 5 dark purplish red. Images were captured immediately after sensory scoring under the same lighting conditions. Algorithms were developed to segment the loin images into background, muscle and fat (Lu et al., 2000). Color image features were computed, which included the means and standard deviations of red, green, and blue values of the segmented loin muscle areas. Both statistical and neural network models were employed to predict the sensory color scores from the image features. The partial least squares technique was used to determine the latent variables, which were subsequently used to derive a statistical model by multiple linear regression (MLR) and a neural network model by back-propagation.

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The correlation coecients between the predicted and the sensory color scores were 0.75 for the neural network model and 0.52 for the statistical model. A prediction error of 0.6 or lower was considered negligible from a practical point of view. For the neural network model, 93.2% of the samples had a prediction error lower than 0.6; and for the statistical model, the percentage was 84.1%. These results showed that image processing plus neural network modeling is an eective tool for predicting consumer responses to fresh pork color. 2.2. Skeletal maturity Image processing and neural network techniques were developed to determine the skeletal maturity of beef carcasses (Hatem & Tan, 1998). Maturity refers to the physiological age, which is not synonymous with chronological age. Maturity is a factor in beef quality grading. Beef tenderness reduces with increasing maturity. In the United States, beef carcass maturity is determined by subjective evaluation of indicators such as cartilage ossication in the vertebrae. There are ve maturity levels, designated as A (young) through E (old). Two sets of carcass samples were used. The rst set included 110 carcasses selected from a commercial plant. An ocial USDA grader graded the carcasses and provided the maturity scores, which ranged from A to E. The second set included 28 cattle of known chronological age. Most of them were of A maturity and the rest were of B maturity. They were prepared in a dierent commercial plant. Digital color images were taken right after ocial grading under the same orescent lighting conditions. For each set of images, the lighting and camera settings were kept constant. The images were focused on the thoracic vertebra around 13th to 15th ribs (Fig. 2). Existing research has shown that the degree of cartilage ossication in the vertebrae is the most important indicator of skeletal maturity. For A maturity, the cartilage in the thoracic vertebrae is free of ossication; and for B maturity, there is some evidence of ossication. Then the cartilage becomes progressively ossied with age until it appears as bone. The degree of cartilage ossication was characterized by processing the vertebra images. First, image segmentation was performed to isolate the bones with the cartilage (Hatem & Tan, 2000). Color and spatial features were used for segmentation. The hue in the HSI (hue, saturation, and intensity) color system was found eective in segmenting the cartilage areas while the a value in the CIE-Lab color system gave good results for segmenting the bones. After a set of morphological operations to rene the segmented cartilage and bone, the two were combined into a bone-cartilage object

Fig. 2. Vertebra image. Upper: original. Lower: segmented bonecartilage object.

(Fig. 2), which was then used to characterize cartilage ossication. The fact that cartilage has a lighter color than bones was used to yield image features. The color values would vary along the bone-cartilage object dierently for different degrees of ossication or maturity (Hatem & Tan, 1998). Younger animals have more cartilage and thus give a longer segment of light colors along the length of the object. The average hue value was computed along the length of the bone-cartilage object as image features. After normalization, these hue values were used as input vectors to a neural network. The output of the neural network was the maturity score. The network had a twolayer log-sigmoid/log-sigmoid structure. It was trained by using the back-propagation algorithm in the Matlab environment (The Mathworks, Natick, MA). The trained neural network served as both a feature extractor and maturity score predictor. Every set of samples was divided into ve sub-sets for training and testing in a rotating fashion. For each rotation, four sub-sets were used for training and the fth sub-set for testing. The predicted maturity scores were compared with those

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given by the professional grader and the percentage of correct classication was calculated. The fuzzy concept described in Tan et al. (1998) was incorporated in the use of human scores. The average correct classication rates for the ve rotations varied from 55% to 77%. To verify the results from the rst set of samples, the same algorithm was applied to the second set of samples. The correct classication rate ranged between 57% and 86% with an average of 75%. This shows that the procedure developed had certain generality and robustness.

3. Predicting USDA grades USDA beef quality and yield grades were predicted from image features (Lu, Tan, Gao, & Gerrard, 1998). Beef carcasses (247 for quality grading, 241 for yield grading) of the same maturity were selected in a commercial packing plant during normal production operations. The carcasses were prepared the way they are normally processed in the industry. The quality and yield grades were given by an ocial USDA grader. Quality was appraised with an 8-point scale (prime, choice, select, standard, commercial, utility, cutter, and canner). Yield was scored with a 5-point scale (15). Digital color images of the ribbed surfaces (steaks) were captured immediately after the ocial grading under the same lighting conditions. After various steps of image segmentation to obtain the image regions of interest, image features were computed. The color and marbling features are described in a previous section. Fat thickness is an indicator of lean meat yield. Fig. 3 shows the fat area for the sample shown in Fig. 1. The back-fat area was partitioned into two halves: the dorsal part (the upper-left half of the fat area in Fig. 3) and the

ventral part (the lower-right half of the fat area in Fig. 3). The thickness was computed in the direction approximately perpendicular to the back curvature (lower boundary of the fat area in Fig. 3). The average thickness of the ventral part and that of the dorsal part were used as fat thickness measures. A method of divergence maximization was developed to maximize the dierences among classes by applying linear and nonlinear transforms (Lu & Tan, 1998). Linear transforms were employed for quality classication. Linear, quadratic and cubic transforms were applied for yield classication. The Euclidean distance was used as a similarity measure. Supervised classiers were trained for both quality and yield classication. The data set was randomly partitioned into 10 sub-sets. Nine of the 10 sub-sets were used for training and the 10th used for testing in a rotating manner till all the sub-sets were used for testing. The rate of correct quality classication varied with the rotations of the procedure. For three of the 10 rotations, it was 100%; four of them, 9099%; and the remaining three, 6070%. The overall rate of correct quality classication was 85.3%. For classication of biological products, which usually involve signicant variability and inconsistencies, the results were considered excellent. With a linear transform, the rate of correct yield classication for the 10 rotations of the procedure was above 50% for all the rotations except two. Applying quadratic and cubic transforms did not bring about signicant improvements. The linear transform yielded the best performance. The overall rate of correct classication was 64.2%. This was considered reasonably good, given the fact that the grades from a single grader are usually not very consistent.

4. Predicting tenderness In commercial production, marbling and color constitute most of the beef quality grade since most animals are young (A or B maturity). Color and marbling, and thus the quality grade, however, are only weak predictors of the eating quality attributes, of which tenderness is the most important. There is need to nd other quantitative predicators of beef tenderness. Muscle texture was characterized by image processing. Color, marbling and textural features were used to predict beef tenderness measured with WarnerBratzler shear forces and sensory evaluations. 4.1. WarnerBratzler shear force Two hundred sixty-ve carcasses were selected to dier in USDA quality grades in a commercial packing plant. The samples were all of A maturity. A rib

Fig. 3. Fat area for the sample shown in Fig. 1.

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section (posterior end) was removed and vacuumpackaged. This rib section was fabricated into 2.54-cm thick steaks for WarnerBratzler shear force measurements. The steaks were cooked on a Hobart ModelCB51 char broiler. During broiling, steaks were turned at 4, 8, 11, and, if necessary, 14 min until they reached a nal internal temperature of 70 C. Temperature was monitored with a thermocouple-based thermometer. After cooking, the steaks were cooled to room temperature (approximately 18 C). Eight cores of 1.27-cm diameter were removed from each steak parallel to the muscle bers and sheared with a WarnerBratzler instrument. The average maximum shear force readings were used in the data analysis and they varied from 1.25 to 5.24 kg (12.2551.35 N). Images of the ribbed surfaces were captured in the plant immediately following quality grading. The same exposure and focal distance were used for all the images. The steak images were segmented into muscle, fat and marbling as described previously. The color and marbling features were those described in Section 2.1. The image texture of beef muscles was considered directly or indirectly related to tenderness. Fig. 4 shows dierences in the image textures of beef samples of different tenderness and these dierences are measurable by image processing (Li, Tan, & Shatadal, 1999). Image textural features based on pixel value run length and spatial dependence were computed as predictors of tenderness. A pixel value run is a set of connected pixels having the same or close pixel values. Pixel value runs can be characterized by the pixel value, the length, and the direction of the run. Within a run, the pixel values are within a relatively narrow band, forming a fairly smooth area. The histogram of pixel value band run length is dened as P R; h; T , where P stands for probability, R is run length in number of pixels, h is the run direction on the image plane, and T is the pixel value band thickness or range of pixel values included in a run (Gao & Tan, 1996a, 1996b). Features computed from the pixel value band run length histogram included: lrT rrT MrT mean, giving the average run length, standard deviation, showing variation of run length, and third moment, indicating the imbalance of run length.

Fig. 4. The saturation images of two samples of dierent tenderness exhibit dierent image textures. The upper sample is less tender.

Subscript T denotes the band thickness and it ranged from 2 to 7. Pixel value spatial dependence can be described by a matrix P . Entry P i; j; d; a is the normalized frequency at which two pixels d-pixels apart in direction a have pixel values i and j respectively. A general procedure can be found in Haralick, Shanmugum, and Dinstein (1973) for extracting textural properties from this matrix and

14 texture features are suggested. The rst 13 features were used in the research. Since the images were roughly isotropic, only direction a 0 (horizontal) was used. Distance d was chosen from 2 to 7. A method based on the auto-correlation function was used to determine the appropriate distance (Li et al., 1998). When d 3, the texture features had the highest correlation with shear force and they were selected for subsequent analyses. Principal component regression (PCR), which is principal component analysis (PCA) followed by MLR, and partial least squares (PLS) were performed to test the improvement in shear force prediction after adding the texture features to the color and marbling features. The SAS Stepwise procedure was performed to select the signicant variables. Discrimination analysis was also used to classify the beef samples. Predictions of shear force from color and marbling characteristics turned out to be very poor. When the ocial color and marbling scores were used as predictor variables, the shear force regression R2 -value was less

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than 0.05. When the color and marbling image features were used, R2 0:16. Muscle image textural features were combined with the color and marbling features to improve the prediction of shear force. Three methods were used to analyze the usefulness of textural features: PCR, PLS and discriminant analysis. PCR gave a model with an R2 -value of 0.18 while PLS yielded a model with an R2 -value of 0.34. These results are still very poor, but the PLS analysis showed that adding the textural features signicantly improved the shear force prediction over using color and marbling features only R2 0:16. The beef samples were segregated into three categories based on shear force values (61.71 kg, 1.713.09 kg, and P3.09 kg). One hundred ninety-eight samples were used as calibration data and 45 samples were used as test data. The SAS Discriminant procedure with a linear discriminant function was used to classify the samples. The calibration samples could be classied with 76% accuracy and the test samples with 77% accuracy. Although there are possibilities to improve the models for shear force prediction from color, marbling and textural features, the results obtained were poor. This may indicate that color, marbling and muscle image texture do not contain sucient information to dene cooked-meat shear force. Nevertheless, the inclusion of textural features brought about signicant improvement. The image texture of muscles is at least as signicant an indicator of the mechanical properties of beef muscles as color and marbling (Li et al., 1999). 4.2. Sensory tenderness Beef samples were cut from the short lions of pasturenished steers and feedlot-nished steers of the same maturity grade. Two sets of short strip loins were taken from the carcass samples, each having 97 pieces. One set of the samples was used for sensory tenderness evaluation and the other used for image analysis. A 10-person panel was trained for sensory evaluation. The steak samples were cooked individually by broiling to an internal temperature of 68 C. The cooked samples were then cut into small size and evaluated, while warm, by the trained panel for tenderness. A line scale of 16.4cm long was used for tenderness scoring. Images of the beef samples were acquired individually in a chamber with a uniform black background and warm-white-deluxe uorescent lighting. The same exposure and focal distance were used for all the samples. The images were processed and the features described in the last section were computed. The features computed were rst screened for colinearity. By using MLR, the run length features for band thickness T 2 and the spatial dependence features for distance d 1 were selected. Finally, 37 features were selected for further analysis.

The beef samples (97) were divided into a training sub-set (72) and a test sub-set (25). PCR and PLS were performed to test the improvement in tenderness prediction resulting from adding texture features. The SAS Stepwise procedure was performed to select the variables signicant for tenderness prediction. A neural network model was also developed. All the samples were used in PCR. The R2 -value for the regression model increased from 0.30 with the color and marbling features alone to 0.72 after adding the texture features. This improvement indicated that the texture features made a signicant contribution to beef tenderness prediction. In the PLS analysis, the rst 14 factors explained most of the variations and were used for regression. The R2 -values for the training data set and test data set were 0.35 and 0.17 respectively for using only the color and marbling features. They increased to 0.70 and 0.62 respectively after adding the texture features. The increase in R2 -value again veried the usefulness of the texture features as indicators of beef tenderness. The 14 factors from the PLS analysis were used as inputs and the tenderness scores were used as the output for a neural network with one hidden layer. The backpropagation algorithm was used to train the neural network. After the network was trained, the test data set was used to test the model. A prediction R2 -value of 0.70 was obtained, a similar result to those from PCR and PLS (Li et al., 1999). In a further study (Li et al., 2001), 59 crossbred steers were used. The sample preparation and sensory evaluation were conducted in the same manner as described above. The samples were then segregated into tough (tenderness score <8) and tender (otherwise) groups. An area about 250 mm2 of the LD muscle was imaged for each sample. Each color image (480 512 pixels) was divided into several sub-images of 64 64 pixels. Fortyve of these smaller images from the tough group and 45 from the tender group were randomly selected for further analysis. The tenderness scores for the tough samples ranged from 4.17 to 6.67 and those for the tender samples varied from 8.54 to 11.99. A wavelet-based method was developed to decompose a texture image into textural primitives of dierent sizes (Li et al., 1999). In this research, the textural primitives were rectangles. Each image (the saturation function used) was decomposed into 35 dierent primitives. The degree of presence of each primitive type was measured with the percentage of the image area occupied by the primitive, which was referred to as the primitive fraction. Analysis of variance and correlation analysis reduced the 35 primitive fractions to 10, which were signicantly dierent between the tough and tender groups and were not signicantly correlated to one another. The 10 primitive fractions were used for multivariate classication based on the Fishers liner discriminant

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5. Remaining challenges and opportunities Great strides have been made towards computer vision-based evaluation of meat. To make this technology practically useful, several challenges still remain. At the same time, there are many research opportunities of great potential.

5.1. Image segmentation System robustness, real-time capability, sample handling, and standardization are among the issues that remain to be addressed. The last three issues will require further research and development, but there do not seem to be insurmountable diculties. System robustness or reliability, however, entails further in-depth research. It is a major challenge to design a system that has sucient exibility and adaptability to handle the biological variations in meat products. At the core of this issue is image segmentation. Reliably and consistently segmenting a meat image into parts of interest without human intervention is prerequisite to success of all subsequent operations and thereby prerequisite to the eventual success in computer vision-based meat grading. Given the complex nature of meat images, no existing algorithms are totally eective for meat image segmentation. There have been successes in employing multivariate and nonlinear approaches (Gao et al., 1995; Lu & Tan, 1998). Our recent work has focused on fundamental methodology development in multivariate classication that will lead to unsupervised image segmentation algorithms eective for meat image processing (Lu, 2002). Unsupervised techniques and algorithms with self-learning capability appear to be the key to robust meat image segmentation. Basic methodology development is needed.

Fig. 5. A near-infrared beefsteak image taken at wavelength 850 nm.

(SAS, 1996). The leave-one-out scheme was used, in which 89 of the 90 samples were used to train the Fishers linear discriminant and the remaining one used for testing. This scheme was repeated rotationally for all 90 samples. Out of the 45 tough and 45 tender samples, 38 tough and 37 tender samples were correctly classied, giving an overall correct classication rate of 83.3%. Instead of the Fishers linear discriminant, a neural network classier was trained and used in the same rotational fashion, which yielded an overall correct classication rate of 82.3%. The nonlinear neural network classier showed little advantage over the linear Fisher classier. Near-infrared (NIR) spectral features have also been studied for beef tenderness prediction (Hatem, Tan, & Shatadal, 1999). Forty steers were slaughtered and graded. Short loins were removed for sensory tenderness evaluation by a trained panel as described previously and for NIR imaging. Steak images were captured with an NIR camera and a tunable NIR lter for 20 dierent wavelengths from 650 to 1030 nm at 20-nm increments. Fig. 5 shows an image taken at 850-nm wavelength. The image intensities were adjusted according to the spectral characteristics of the camera and the lter. Areas of muscle, fat and marbling were segmented and a 20-point spectrum was computed for muscle, fat or marbling of every sample. Dierent combinations of these spectra were used as inputs to train neural network models for tenderness prediction. The most useful combination found was the dierence between the muscle and fat spectra. The sensory tenderness scale was from 0 and 16.4. If a prediction within unity from the average sensory panel score was considered correct, the correct prediction rate was 67%. Over 90% of the predictions were within one standard deviation from the averages of the 10-member panel scores.

5.2. Power of quality indicators As discussed earlier, the conventional quality indicators of color, marbling and maturity lead to poor predictions of important quality measures such as tenderness. There are both needs and opportunities to empower the quality grading system by discovering new measurable fresh-meat characteristics that are predictors of cooked-meat quality. The ability of image processing to characterize complex and subtle dierences provides a range of possibilities. Our eorts have focused on image texture and NIR characteristics. Many more possibilities remain unexplored. In particular, images captured with dierent wavelengths and even dierent modalities have the potential to reveal additional quality information.

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6. Conclusions Results from several applications show that color image processing is a useful technique for meat quality evaluation. Quality attributes such as muscle color, marbling, maturity and muscle texture can be eectively quantied and characterized. USDA quality and yield grades and cooked-beef tenderness can be predicted to a satisfactory accuracy. Computer vision is a promising technology for objective meat quality grading. The existing research has formed a foundation so that a computerized grading assistant can be implemented. This assistant can provide a human grader with quantitative information unobtainable subjectively. To replace the human graders, however, much work remains. Among the issues requiring continued research, eective methodologies for consistent meat image segmentation are on the top of the list. This will entail basic research on image segmentation and classication. There are also needs and opportunities for discovering new quality indicators. In particular, imaging with dierent wavelengths and modalities hold promises.

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