THICKNESS-COMPENSATED X-RAY IMAGING DETECTION OF BONE FRAGMENTS IN DEBONED POULTRY—MODEL ANALYSIS

Abstract

Detection of bone fragments in poultry meat remains a challenge. In the industrial deboning process, bonefragments often remain in chicken fillets, escaping manual or x-ray machine detection. A new method was proposed tocompensate for x-ray absorption variations, which occur due to the uneven thickness of fillets. Imaging detectionalgorithms were developed to integrate thickness and x-ray images and to produce a thickness-compensated x-ray imagefor the extraction of bone fragment signals. Plastic molds with four different slopes were designed for forming poultrymeat for conceptual tests and imaging algorithm development. Experimental results from sample analyses demonstratedthat the four types of frequent and hard-to-detect bone fragments could be detected no matter where they were located inchicken meat of uneven thickness. The proposed imaging method eliminated the false patterns and enhanced thesensitivity of x-ray in bone fragment detection. The technique has the potential for non-destructive internal detection ofhazardous materials in food products with uneven thickness.