• Proceedings of the Korean Society for Agricultural Machinery Conference
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• 1996.06c
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• pp.780-791
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• 1996

A hybrid image processing system which automatically distinguished lean tissues in the image of a complex beef cut surface and generated the lean tissue contour has been developed. Because of the in homegeneous distribution and fuzzy pattern of fat and lean tissue on the beef cut, conventional image segmentation and contour generation algorithm suffer from a heavy computing requirement, algorithm complexity and poor robustness. The proposed system utilizes an artificial neural network enhance the robustness of processing. The system is composed of pre-network , network and post-network processing stages. At the pre-network stage, gray level images of beef cuts were segmented and resized to be adequate to the network input. Features such as fat and bone were enhanced and the enhanced input image was converted tot he grid pattern image, whose grid was formed as 4 X4 pixel size. at the network stage, the normalized gray value of each grid image was taken as the network input. Th pre-trained network generated the grid image output of the isolated lean tissue. A training scheme of the network and the separating performance were presented and analyzed. The developed hybrid system showed the feasibility of the human like robust object segmentation and contour generation for the complex , fuzzy and irregular image.

• Journal of Biosystems Engineering
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• v.30 no.6 s.113
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• pp.340-346
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• 2005

Major quality features of the beef carcass in most countries including Korea are size, marbling state of the lean tissue, color of the fat and lean tissue, and thickness of back fat of the 13th rib. To evaluate the beef quality, extracting loin parts from the sectional image of the 13th beef rib is crucial and is the first step. However, because of the inhomogeneous distribution and fuzzy pattern of the fat and lean tissues on the beef cut, it is difficult to extract automatically the proper contour of the lean tissue. In this paper, a prototype mobile beef quality measurement system, which can be implemented practically at the beef processing site was developed. The developed system was composed of the hand held image acquisition unit and mobile processing unit mounted with touch-pad screen. Algorithms to extract the boundary of the lean tissue and a proper tool to evaluate the marbling status have been developed using color image processing. The boundary extraction algorithm showed successful results for the beef cuts with simple and moderate patterns of the lean tissue and fat. However, it had some difficulty in eliminating complex pattern of the extraneous tissues adhered to the lean tissue in the boundary extraction. The developed algorithms were implemented to the prototype mobile processing unit.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society for Agricultural Machinery Conference
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• 2000.11c
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• pp.715-721
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• 2000

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.