Embedded bone fragment detection in chicken fillets using transmittance image enhancement and hyperspectral reflectance imaging

This paper is concerned with the detection of bone fragments embedded in compressed de-boned skinless chicken breast fillets by enhancing single-band transmittance images generated by back-lighting and exploiting spectral information from hyperspectral reflectance images. Optical imaging of chicken fillets is often dominated by multiple scattering properties of the fillets. Thus, resulting images from multiple scattering are diffused, scattered and low contrast. In this study, a fusion of hyperspectral transmittance and reflectance imaging, which is a non-ionized and non-destructive imaging modality, was investigated as an alternative method to the conventional transmittance X-ray imaging technique which is an ionizing imaging modality. An image formation model, called an illumination–transmittance model, was applied for correcting non-uniform illumination effects so that embedded bones are more easily detectable by a simple segmentation method using a single threshold value. Predicted bones from the segmentation were classified by the nearest neighbor classifier that was trained by the spectral library of mean reflectance of chicken tissues like fat, meat and embedded bones. Experimental results with chicken breast fillets and bone fragments are provided.