Bone fragment detection in chicken breast fillets using diffuse scattering patterns of back-illuminated structured light

This paper is concerned with the detection of bone fragments embedded in de-boned skinless chicken breast fillets by modeling images made by back-lighting and embedded bone fragments. Imaging of chicken fillets is often dominated by strongly multiple scattering properties of the fillets. Thus, resulting images from multiple scattering are diffused, scattered and low contrast. In this study, both transmittance and reflectance hyperspectral imaging, which is a nonionized and non-destructive imaging modality, is investigated as an alternative method to the conventional transmittance X-ray imaging technique which is an ionizing imaging modality. As a way of reducing the influence of light scattering on images and thus increasing the image contrast, the use of a structured line light is examined along with an image formation model that separates undesirable lighting effects from an image. The image formation model based on an illumination-transmittance model is applied for correcting non-uniform illumination effects so that embedded bones are more easily detected by a global threshold. An automated image processing algorithm to detect bones is also proposed. Experimental results with chicken breast fillets and bone fragments are provided.