Bone Fragment Detection in Chicken Breast Fillets Using Transmittance Image Enhancement

This article is concerned with the detection of bone fragments embedded in de‐boned skinless chicken breast fillets by modeling optical images generated by backlighting. 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 combination of transmittance and reflectance hyperspectral imaging, which is a non‐ionized and non‐destructive imaging modality, was investigated as an alternative method to conventional transmittance x‐ray imaging, 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 was examined along with an image formation model that separated undesirable lighting effects from an image. The image formation model, based on an illumination‐transmittance model, was applied for correcting non‐uniform illumination effects so that embedded bones were more easily detected by a single threshold. An automated image processing algorithm to detect bones was also proposed. Experimental results with chicken breast fillets and bone fragments are provided. The detection accuracy of the developed technology was 100%. The false‐positive rate was 10%.