Development of imaging system for online detection of chicken meat with wooden breast condition

Authors: Yoon, Seung-Chul; Bowker, Brian; Zhuang, Hong; Lawrence, Kurt

Submitted to: Sensors
Publication Type: Peer Reviewed Journal
Publication Acceptance Date: 1/25/2022
Publication Date: 1/28/2022
Citation: Yoon, S.C., Bowker, B.C., Zhuang, H., Lawrence, K.C. 2022. Development of imaging system for online detection of chicken meat with wooden breast condition. Sensors. 22(3):1036. https://doi.org/10.3390/s22031036.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.3390/s22031036

Interpretive Summary: The wooden breast condition is an emerging meat quality defect that negatively impacts the poultry industry worldwide. Chicken breast fillets with this myopathy are characterized as having an abnormal rubbery, hard, and/or stiff feel to them in the raw state. The wooden breast condition results in decreased fresh meat quality, inferior yield in processed products, diminished nutritional quality, potential product condemnations, and reduced customer/consumer acceptance. Due to altered shape and rigidity issues,the wooden breast fillets may also create problems for processors during fillet portioning and further processing. The current method of detection in the poultry industry involves visual and/or tactile evaluation. The ARS research team developed an innovative non-contact imaging method to rapidly and accurately detect this myopathy during poultry processing. The key idea that resulted in a patent in 2020 was to monitor the discharge end of a flat-belt conveyor with a high-speed digital camera, where fillets fell off and thus dynamic bending of fillets happened naturally. The paper demonstrated that the developed imaging system could detect the presence or absence of the WB condition in individual boneless and skinless breast fillets with over 95% accuracy.

Technical Abstract: This paper is concerned with development of imaging technology for online detection of chicken breast fillets affected by a myopathy, called the wooden (or woody) breast (WB) condition. In recent years, the woody breast condition has emerged as a major meat quality defect in the poultry industry worldwide. The wooden breast (WB) condition results in decreased fresh meat quality, inferior yield in processed products, diminished nutritional quality, potential product condemnations, and reduced customer/consumer acceptance. Due to altered shape and rigidity issues, WB fillets may also create problems for processors during fillet portioning and further processing. The current method of WB detection in the poultry industry involves visual and/or tactile evaluation. The paper describes how a physical property (bending) of an individual chicken-breast fillet could be measured in high-speed processing lines and used to solve the WB detection problem. The key idea was to monitor the discharge end of a flat-belt conveyor with a high-speed machine vision camera, where fillets fell off and thus dynamic bending of fillets happened naturally. An imaging system processed images captured at 200 frames/s, found the maximum bending moment of an individual fillet, and measured its bending degree through a developed image processing algorithm.