A Computer Vision-Based Method for Classification of Red Meat Quality After Nitrosamine Appendage

Nitrosamine is a carcinogenic chemical used as a preservative in red meat whose identification is an ordeal. This paper presents a computer vision-based non-destructive method for identifying quality disparities between preservative treated and untreated (control) red meat. To access the discrepancy in the quality of red meat, both traditional machine learning and deep learning-based methods have been used. Support vector machine (SVM) classifier and artificial neural network (ANN) models have been used to detect the presence of nitrosamine in test samples. The paper also made use of different pre-trained deep convolutional neural networks (DCNN) with transfer learning approach such as ResNet-34, ResNet-50, ResNet-101, VGG-16, VGG-19, AlexNet and MobileNetv2 to examine the presence of nitrosamine in the food samples. While the ANN classifier performed better in comparison to the SVM classifier, the highest testing accuracy and F1-score were obtained using the deep learning model, ResNet-101 with 95.45% and 96.54%, respectively. The experimental results demonstrate an improved performance in comparison to the existing methods; indicating the feasibility of the proposed work for food quality control in real-time applications.