EXTRACTION OF THE LEAN TISSUE BOUNDARY OF A BEEF CARCASS

In this research, rule and neuro net based boundary extraction algorithm was developed. Extracting boundary of the interest, lean tissue, is essential for the quality evaluation of the beef based on color machine vision. Major quality features of the beef are size, marveling state of the lean tissue, color of the fat, and thickness of back fat. To evaluate the beef quality, extracting of loin parts from the sectional image of beef rib is crucial and the first step. Since its boundary is not clear and very difficult to trace, neural network model was developed to isolate loin parts from the entire image input. At the stage of training network, normalized color image data was used. Model reference of boundary was determined by binary feature extraction algorithm using R(red) channel. And 100 sub-images(selected from maximum extended boundary rectangle 11${\times}$11 masks) were used as training data set. Each mask has information on the curvature of boundary. The basic rule in boundary extraction is the adaptation of the known curvature of the boundary. The structured model reference and neural net based boundary extraction algorithm was developed and implemented to the beef image and results were analyzed.