Evaluation of chicken meat freshness using olfaction machine and artificial neural networks

Today, human’s specific attention to food quality has led to the development of fast, easy and non-destructive methods to assess the quality of foodstuffs. Meat is one of the most important foods and its freshness is considered as the most important qualitative feature. Therefore, checking its quality for consumption has great value worthwhile. The main objective of the present study is to investigate the possibility of using electronic nose and artificial neural network methods for detecting the freshness of chicken meat during storage in a refrigerator at 4 ºC. In the used neural network system, the input layer consists of 10 neurons based on the number of sensors and the output layer includes 3 neurons related to classes of different freshness classes of chicken meat. Different classifier networks were designed and after investigation of different network structures; the best structure of the network was obtained with a hidden layer and 6 neurons in that layer. Finally, the optimal network with a general structure of 10-6-3 was created to detect the freshness of chicken meat during different days of storage. The used statistical indices to assess the classifier to evaluate the freshness of chicken meat including accuracy, precision, sensitivity, specificity and area under the curve factors. The values of these indices for classification using selected characteristics are 95.77, 94.7, 92.18, 95.95, and 94.1 respectively. Therefore, given that the main objective of the present study was to develop and implementation of an intelligent diagnosis system of chicken meat freshness using an electronic nose system. The acceptable obtained results of the present study indicate that the proposed applied system based on the electronic nose system and artificial neural networks methods as a smart and reliable method can online classification of chicken meat as fast, easy, economical, non-destructive and with appropriate accuracy.