Fitting Contours of Marbling in Iberian Ham Images

Cured Iberian ham is one of the most valuable meat products of Spain and Portugal, with a first-rate consumer acceptance. Its sensorial characteristics are basically due to high intramuscular fat content and marbling, i.e. number, position, shape and size of intramuscular fat streaks. Our current attempts are to investigate the relationship between spatio-geometrical characteristics of fat streaks and Iberian ham sensorial quality. To achieve this goal, not only the detection of streaks is important, but also the identification of their contours with high accuracy. In previous work we have developed a method for this purpose, based on two steps: obtaining an initial estimate of the position of the streaks and refining the estimate by region growing techniques. In this paper we concentrate on the latter issue, evaluating the performance of several region growing techniques in the task of contour-fitting of marbling in Iberian ham images. A statistical study of pixel and region classification is provided and discussed.