Quality evaluation of eggs during shelf-life ambient storage by laser speckle technique

Abstract

Laser speckle technique is non-destructive, cost-effective with a simple experimental setup, and has been used in the field of agriculture, food processing, medicines etc. A coherent laser source, CCD Camera, and a recording system are needed to record the speckle image. Our objective of this work is to both quantify and visualize the quality of chicken eggs using the non-destructive Laser speckle technique and also to verify the outcomes with other established destructive techniques such as calculation of Haugh Unit (HU), Yolk Index (YI), PH value etc. In this work, we have done the single exposure speckle image as well as the biospeckle activity analysis of eggs stored under ambient conditions at room temperature (29±3°C) for seven days of shelf-life storage. We have approached a new probabilistic method to quantify a single exposure speckle image and the Frequent Motion Image (FMI) method to construct the speckle activity map of the egg's internal constituents. As a result, we have found that the biospeckle activity of eggs decreased by 24–38% after seven days, its internal activity map changed significantly. An egg on the first day of storage shows high biospeckle activity compared to other days. For the single exposure speckle image, the calculated Average energy decreased by 40–60%, and Entropy increased by 10–15%, with significant differences for each day during seven days of shelf storage. The average HU decreases by around 15%, and the YI decreases by 10% during seven days of ambient storage.