Development, Validation and Preliminary Experiments of a Measuring Technique for Eggs Aging Estimation Based on Pulse...

Area of Science:

• Food Science and Technology
• Non-Destructive Testing
• Image Processing

Background:

• Assessing hen egg freshness is crucial for the food industry due to natural aging influenced by storage.
• Traditional methods like candling have limitations due to their subjective and qualitative nature.
• Egg freshness is inversely related to air chamber size.

Purpose of the Study:

• To propose a robust and automated approach for evaluating egg freshness using pulsed phase thermography (PPT).
• To develop an image processing algorithm for automatically measuring air chamber parameters (size, normalized area, volume).
• To validate the method's accuracy and correlation with egg aging markers.

Main Methods:

• Acquisition of raw and phase infrared images of hen eggs.
• Post-processing images with a dedicated algorithm to measure air chamber dimensions.
• Conducting repeatability, reproducibility, and experimental tests on 30 eggs across size categories (M, L, XL).

Main Results:

• The proposed PPT method demonstrated high robustness with measurement uncertainty not exceeding 5%.
• A strong analytical relationship (R² > 0.95) was found between air chamber geometric data and weight loss.
• This correlation was consistent across different egg size categories.

Conclusions:

• Pulsed phase thermography provides an effective, automated quality control tool for assessing hen egg freshness.
• The method accurately infers egg aging by monitoring air chamber size evolution.
• This non-destructive technique offers a reliable alternative to traditional egg freshness assessment methods.