A Novel Chicken Meat Quality Evaluation Method Based on Color Card Localization and Color Correction

Among all the chicken meat quality evaluation metrics, color is one of the most significant factors directly related to the freshness of meat inducing the purchase desire. Biochemical tests for evaluating meat quality may contaminate or damage the test samples. Visual rating method is subjectively inefficient and difficult to realize online detection. Colorimeter has the disadvantages of complicated time-consuming operations, high technical requirements and expensive instruments. This paper proposes a low-cost, contactless chicken meat quality evaluation method by examining the color image of chicken meat. Specifically, the meat image is acquired by the camera of a smartphone. To eliminate the chromatic aberration, a pre-defined color card is put beside meat and automatically localized to extract the captured color information for color correction. Finally, the corrected colors of all the experimental meat samples are analyzed by hierarchical clustering to achieve 3 different quality levels.