Investigating oyster shell thickness and strength using three imaging modalities: hyperspectral imaging, thermal imaging and digital photography

Abstract

A comparative study of three imaging technologies has been conducted to nondestructively assess the thickness and strength of oyster shells grown in various environmental conditions. Oyster shell thickness and strength are expected to be dependent on the harshness of the oyster's environment as well as other factors. Oysters have been grown in environments with and without predators, and within and out of tidal zones. Hyperspectral imaging has been used to detect possible differences in hyperspectral properties among oyster shells from each of the four environments. Thermal Imaging has been utilized to identify hot spots in the shells based on the principles of heat capacitance, indicating density or thickness of the shells. Finally, a visible-range digital photographic camera has been used to obtain digital images. The three technologies are compared to evaluate the effectiveness of each technology in identifying oyster shell thickness and strength. Although oyster shell thickness and strength are related, they may not be exactly correlated. The local thickness of the oyster shells have been measured with a micro caliper, and shells broken with a crush tester to establish a baseline and ground truth for average shell thickness and shell strength, respectively. The preliminary results from the three methods demonstrate that thermal imaging correlates the best with the invasive strength test results and weight measurements. Using hyperspectral data and principal component analysis, classification of the four oyster shell groups were achieved. Visible-range images mainly provided size, shape, color and texture information.