Measurement of food colour in L*a*b* units from RGB digital image using least squares support vector machine regression

The aim of this work is to evaluate the potential of least squares support vector machine (LS-SVM) regression to develop an efficient method to measure the colour of food materials in L*a*b* units by means of a computer vision systems (CVS). A laboratory CVS, based on colour digital camera (CDC), was implemented and three LS-SVM models were trained and validated, one for each output variables (L*, a*, and b*) required by this problem, using the RGB signals generated by the CDC as input variables to these models. The colour target-based approach was used to camera characterization and a standard reference target of 242 colour samples was acquired using the CVS and a colorimeter. This data set was split in two sets of equal sizes, for training and validating the LS-SVM models. An effective two-stage grid search process on the parameters space was performed in MATLAB to tune the regularization parameters γ and the kernel parameters σ² of the three LS-SVM models. A 3-8-3 multilayer feed-forward neural network (MFNN), according to the research conducted by León <em>et al.</em> (2006), was also trained in order to compare its performance with those of LS-SVM models. The LS-SVM models developed in this research have been shown better generalization capability then the MFNN, allowed to obtain high correlations between L*a*b* data acquired using the colorimeter and the corresponding data obtained by transformation of the RGB data acquired by the CVS. In particular, for the validation set, R² values equal to 0.9989, 0.9987, and 0.9994 for L*, a* and b* parameters were obtained. The root mean square error values were 0.6443, 0.3226, and 0.2702 for L*, a*, and b* respectively, and the average of colour differences ΔE_ab was 0.8232±0.5033 units. Thus, LS-SVM regression seems to be a useful tool to measurement of food colour using a low cost CVS.