Robust Extraction of Lean Tissue Contour From Beef Cut Surface Image

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.