Development of a Low-Cost Multi-Waveband LED Illumination Imaging Technique for Rapid Evaluation of Fresh Meat Quality

Determining the quality of meat has always been essential for the food industry because consumers prefer superior quality meat. Therefore, the food industry requires the development of a rapid and non-destructive method for meat-quality determination. Over the past few years, a number of techniques have been presented for monitoring meat–chemical attributes. However, most previous techniques are quite expensive, destructive, and require complex hardware to operate. Thus, in this work, we demonstrate a low-cost sensing technique (eliminating the expensive equipment and complicated design) for meat–chemical quality detection. The newly developed system was integrated with a low-cost monochrome camera and ordinary light-emitting diode (LED) light sources, with fifteen different wavebands ranging from 458 to 950 nm. The monochrome camera captures images of the meat sample across a spectral range from 458 to 950 nm using a single snapshot method. The chemical values (e.g., moisture, fat, and protein) were also determined using conventional methods. The collected images were combined to produce a multispectral data cube and to extract spectral data. Partial least squares (PLS) and support vector regression (SVR) modeling were used on the extracted spectra and chemical values. The developed models for meat samples displayed accurate chemical-component prediction ( R 2 > 0.80). Our model, based on a monochrome sensor using only fifteen wavebands, provided reasonable results compared with the previously developed expensive spectroscopic techniques. Therefore, this complementary metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS) based multispectral sensing technique may have the potential to detect meat quality, thereby facilitating a simple, fast, and cost-effective method applicable to small-scale meat-processing industries.