Detection of cecal contaminants in visceral cavity of broiler carcasses using hyperspectral imaging

Detecting fecal contaminants in the visceral cavity of the broiler is difficult but extremely important for poultry safety inspection. A hyperspectral imaging system was used for detecting internal cecal contaminants on broiler carcass halves. Two 565- and 517-nm wavelength images were selected from 512 calibrated hypercube image data. Image processing algorithms including band ratio, threshold, and median filtering were used to identify fecal contaminants from the internal cavity. The accuracy of detection algorithms to identify cecal contaminants varied with fecal threshold values and median filter as well. The imaging system identified cecal contaminants with 92.5% detection accuracy but also incorrectly identified 123 carcass features that were not considered as contaminants (false positives) and missed 15 actual contaminants when a fecal threshold value of 1.05 was employed. The higher accuracy (96.9%) and lower missed contaminants were obtained when a different fecal threshold value was used. However, in this case, false positives markedly increased.