Size Characterisation of Edible Bird Nest Impurities: A Preliminary Study

Abstract Edible bird nest (EBN) production is a major industry in South East Asia, motivated by the perception that consumption of this delicacy can help improve the human immune system while slowing down the aging process. However, processing the raw EBN requires a tremendous amount of human effort, making it a very labour-intensive process. The most critical part of this process is the cleaning of the EBN and this is also the most labour intensive and time consuming. Impurities in each sample have to be painstakingly identified and then removed from the rest of the nest. This paper proposed a method to detect the impurities in edible bird nest using K-Means segmentation to help improve the effectiveness of the conventional cleaning process by accurately identifying the impurities of various shapes and sizes. The accuracy of the proposed method has been compared with Fuzzy C-Means.

[1]  Massimo F. Marcone,et al.  Characterization of the edible bird's nest the Caviar of the East , 2005 .

[2]  N. Otsu.  A threshold selection method from gray level histograms , 1979 .

[3]  James C. Bezdek,et al.  Pattern Recognition with Fuzzy Objective Function Algorithms , 1981, Advanced Applications in Pattern Recognition.

[4]  J. MacQueen.  Some methods for classification and analysis of multivariate observations , 1967 .

[5]  J. C. Dunn,et al.  A Fuzzy Relative of the ISODATA Process and Its Use in Detecting Compact Well-Separated Clusters , 1973 .

[6]  Yeong Che Fai,et al.  Edible Bird Nest Processing using Machine Vision and Robotic Arm , 2015 .

[7]  Husniza Hussain,et al.  Effects of edible bird's nest on tumour necrosis factor-alpha secretion, nitric oxide production and cell viability of lipopolysaccharide-stimulated RAW 264.7 macrophages , 2012 .

[8]  R. C. Patel,et al.  An Efficient Method for Detecting Impurity from Rice Mixture Using Digital Embedded System , 2013 .

[9]  Anil K. Jain,et al.  Algorithms for Clustering Data , 1988 .

[10]  Fan Xi,et al.  Detection crack in image using Otsu method and multiple filtering in image processing techniques , 2016 .

[11]  M. H. Nurfatin,et al.  Secrets of edible bird nest , 2015 .

[12]  Chew-Tin Lee,et al.  Edible Bird’s nest extract as a chondro-protective agent for human chondrocytes isolated from osteoarthritic knee: in vitro study , 2013, BMC Complementary and Alternative Medicine.

[13]  R. Wong,et al.  Edible bird’s nest: Food or medicine? , 2013, Chinese Journal of Integrative Medicine.

[14]  Pietro Burrascano,et al.  On-line automatic detection of foreign bodies in biscuits by infrared thermography and image processing , 2014 .

[15]  Chee Peng Lim,et al.  A clustering-based failure mode and effect analysis model and its application to the edible bird nest industry , 2015, Neural Computing and Applications.

[16]  Chee Peng Lim,et al.  Application of the fuzzy Failure Mode and Effect Analysis methodology to edible bird nest processing , 2013 .