Unsupervised Foreign Object Detection Based on Dual-Energy Absorptiometry in the Food Industry

Abstract

X-ray imaging is a widely used technique for non-destructive inspection of agricultural food products. One application of X-ray imaging is the autonomous, in-line detection of foreign objects in food samples. Examples of such inclusions are bone fragments in meat products, plastic and metal debris in fish, and fruit infestations. This article presents a processing methodology for unsupervised foreign object detection based on dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry (DEXA). A novel thickness correction model is introduced as a pre-processing technique for DEXA data. The aim of the model is to homogenize regions in the image that belong to the food product and to enhance contrast where the foreign object is present. In this way, the segmentation of the foreign object is more robust to noise and lack of contrast. The proposed methodology was applied to a dataset of 488 samples of meat products acquired from a conveyor belt. Approximately 60% of the samples contain foreign objects of different types and sizes, while the rest of the samples are void of foreign objects. The results show that samples without foreign objects are correctly identified in 97% of cases and that the overall accuracy of foreign object detection reaches 95%.

Automating catfish cutting process using deep learning-based semantic segmentation

“…16 Computer vision techniques have been widely adopted for aquaculture farming [17][18][19][20][21][22] and seafood processing industries. [23][24][25][26][27] To realize the realtime or near real-time application and achieve the needed accuracy, 28 artificial intelligence (AI)-driven machine learning and deep learning techniques have been integrated with the computer vision system, such as object detection [29][30][31] and semantic/instance segmentation. [32][33][34] Therefore, it is crucial to develop a robust and efficient computer vision system with the integration of deep learning technique to further automate the catfish cutting process.…”