Radial Textures: A New Approach to Analyze Meat Quality by Using MRI

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Traditionally, the quality traits of meat products have been determined by means of physico-chemical methods. As an alternative, computer vision algorithms applied on MRI have been proposed, mainly, because of the non-destructive, non-ionizing and innocuous nature of MRI. Usually, the computer vision algorithms developed to analyze meat quality are based in classical textures. In this paper, a new texture algorithm (called RTA, Radial Texture Algorithm) based on the radial distribution of the images and second order statistics is proposed. The results obtained by RTA were compared to the obtained by means of three well known classical texture algorithms: GLCM (Gray Level Co-occurrence Matrix), GLRLM (Gray Level Run Length Matrix) and NGLDM (Neighbouring Gray Level Dependence Matrix) and correlated to the results obtained by means of physico-chemical methods. GLRLM and NGLDM achieved correlation coefficients between 0.50 and 0.75 whereas RTA and GLCM reached very good to excellent relationship (R > 0.75) for the quality parameters of loins. RTA achieved the best results (0.988 for moisture, 0.883 for lipid content and 0.992 for salt content). These high correlation coefficients confirm the new algorithm as a firm alternative to the classical computational approaches in order to compute the quality traits of meat products in a non-destructive and efficient way.