Skip to main content
ARS Home » Research » Publications at this Location » Publication #257268
Title: Line-scan hyperspectral imaging for real-time poultry fecal detection

Author
item Park, Bosoon
item Yoon, Seung-Chul
item Windham, William
item Lawrence, Kurt
item Heitschmidt, Gerald - Jerry
item Kim, Moon
item Chao, Kuanglin - Kevin Chao

Submitted to: Proceedings of SPIE
Publication Type: Proceedings
Publication Acceptance Date: 4/13/2010
Publication Date: 6/11/2010
Citation: Park, B., Yoon, S.C., Windham, W.R., Lawrence, K.C., Heitschmidt, G.W., Kim, M.S., Chao, K. 2010. Line-scan hyperspectral imaging for real-time poultry fecal detection. Proceedings of SPIE Defense, Security, and Sensing 2010, Orlando, FL, April 5-9, 2010; 7676-19.

Interpretive Summary: The ARS multispectral imaging system with three-band common aperture camera was able to inspect fecal contaminants in real-time mode during poultry processing. Recent study has demonstrated several image processing methods including binning, cuticle removal filter, median filter, and morphological analysis in real-time mode could remove false positive errors. The ARS research groups and their industry partner are now merging the fecal detection and systemically disease detection systems onto a common platform using line-scan hyperspectral imaging system. This system will aid in commercialization by creating one hyperspectral imaging system with user-defined wavelengths that can be installed at different locations of the processing line to solve significant food safety problems. Therefore, the objective of this paper is to demonstrate the feasibility of line-scan hyperspectral imaging system in terms of processing speed and detection accuracy for real-time, on-line fecal detection at current processing speed of commercial poultry plant. The newly developed line-scan hyperspectral imaging system could improve Food Safety Inspection Service (FSIS)’s poultry safety inspection program significantly.

Technical Abstract: The preliminary results demonstrated that high speed line-scan hyperspectral imaging system has a potential for real-time online fecal detection during poultry processing. To improve detection accuracy, fully calibrated images both spatially and spectrally were acquired for further processing. In addition, triggering capability, either external or internal mode, needs to be implemented for real-time image processing. Currently, internal triggering method based on the shape of a carcass is being developed. In doing this, entire processing speed from line-scan image acquisition till analysis to identify fecal contaminants met the industry requirement of 140 birds per minutes. For quality image acquisition, we tested a lighting system both tungsten halogen and light-emitting device (LED). From the preliminary studies, we found high speed line-scan hyperspectral imaging system can be used for fecal contaminant detection as a common platform with wholesomeness inspection that has been tested by ARS Beltsville scientists. However, more research should be done to fully validate performance of the system to detect fecal contaminants in terms of ground truths for high detection accuracy with minimum false positive errors. For this task, we have tested several markers as a ground truths based on confirmation by human inspector and are developing automatic link with ground truths using a charge-coupled device (CCD) color camera.