Could Machine Vision Replace Chemical Procedure to Evaluate Fat Content in Iberian Pig Meat? An Experimental Study

The Iberian pig is an autochthonous animal bred from the southwestern area of Spain. Its dry-cured ham is one of the most appreciated meat products of our country. It has been proved that juiciness and acceptance of meat is mainly influenced by its fat content, either in calf, pig and lamb meat. Chemical procedure is currently the only proved way to determine meat intramuscular fat (IMF) level. Nevertheless, this is a tedious and expensive technique. For the food industries, a cheaper, faster and non-destroying technique to determine fat content before ham selection for maturation process, would be very worthy. We investigate the feasibility of an alternative methodology to determine IMF content of Iberian pig meat using computer vision techniques. The evaluation of the proposed methods is carried out over a dataset of 100 slices of muscles from pig thighs. Correlation values with respect to chemical analysis are provided and discussed.