Machine Learning-Based Pork Meat Quality Prediction and Shelf-Life Estimation

Pork meat is a very important source of proteins and other nutrients, so it requires a high level of quality. There is a serious health risk associated with the consumption of spoiled or contaminated pork meat, which is why it is extremely important to monitor its freshness. In this study, sensor arrays consisting of RGB IR sensors, thermal sensors, electronic noses (gas sensors) for detecting the color, temperature, and carbon dioxide and ammonia level of the pork meat were used to evaluate pork meat quality and estimate shelf life. The use of various supervised machine learning approaches has been applied with optimization to perform classification as to whether the meat was fresh or not, as well as regression analysis to predict the amount of exposure time for the meat that can be used in computing shelf-life estimates. Several high-performance algorithms were then tested, evaluated, and compared after hyperparameters of each model were optimized using grid search. As a result of a comparative analysis of the machine learning used, gentle boost ensembles outperformed other machine learning methods in detecting pork meat quality with 92.8% accuracy, while gaussian process regression predicted shelf life with the lowest RMSE, MSE and MAE.