Discrimination among Fresh, Frozen-Stored and Frozen-Thawed Beef Cuts by Hyperspectral Imaging

The detection of the storage state of frozen meat, especially meat frozen-thawed several times, has always been important for food safety inspections. Hyperspectral imaging (HSI) is widely applied to detect the freshness and quality of meat or meat products. This study investigated the feasibility of the low-cost HSI system, combined with the chemometrics method, to classify beef cuts among fresh (F), frozen-stored (F-S), frozen-thawed three times (F-T-3) and frozen-thawed five times (F-T-5). A compact, low-cost HSI system was designed and calibrated for beef sample measurement. The classification model was developed for meat analysis with a method to distinguish fat and muscle, a CARS algorithm to extract the optimal wavelength subset and three classifiers to identify each beef cut among different freezing processes. The results demonstrated that classification models based on feature variables extracted from differentiated tissue spectra achieved better performances, with ACCs of 92.75% for PLS-DA, 97.83% for SVM and 95.03% for BP-ANN. A visualization map was proposed to provide detailed information about the changes in freshness of beef cuts after freeze-thawing. Furthermore, this study demonstrated the potential of implementing a reasonably priced HSI system in the food industry.