Nondestructive spectroscopic and imaging techniques for quality evaluation and assessment of fish and fish products

Nowadays, people have increasingly realized the importance of acquiring high quality and nutritional values of fish and fish products in their daily diet. Quality evaluation and assessment are always expected and conducted by using rapid and nondestructive methods in order to satisfy both producers and consumers. During the past two decades, spectroscopic and imaging techniques have been developed to nondestructively estimate and measure quality attributes of fish and fish products. Among these noninvasive methods, visible/near-infrared (VIS/NIR) spectroscopy, computer/machine vision, and hyperspectral imaging have been regarded as powerful and effective analytical tools for fish quality analysis and control. VIS/NIR spectroscopy has been widely applied to determine intrinsic quality characteristics of fish samples, such as moisture, protein, fat, and salt. Computer/machine vision on the other hand mainly focuses on the estimation of external features like color, weight, size, and surface defects. Recently, by incorporating both spectroscopy and imaging techniques in one system, hyperspectral imaging cannot only measure the contents of different quality attributes simultaneously, but also obtain the spatial distribution of such attributes when the quality of fish samples are evaluated and measured. This paper systematically reviews the research advances of these three nondestructive optical techniques in the application of fish quality evaluation and determination and discuss future trends in the developments of nondestructive technologies for further quality characterization in fish and fish products.