Colour image processing and texture analysis on images of porterhouse steak meat

This paper outlines two colour image processing and texture analysis techniques applied to meat images and assessment of error due to the use of JPEG compression at image capture. JPEG error analysis was performed by capturing TIFF and JPEG images, then calculating the RMS difference and applying a calibration between block boundary features and subjective visual JPEG scores. Both scores indicated high JPEG quality. Correction of JPEG blocking error was trialled and found to produce minimal improvement in the RMS difference. The texture analysis methods used were singular value decomposition over pixel blocks and complex cell analysis. The block singular values were classified as meat or non- meat by Fisher linear discriminant analysis with the colour image processing result used as ‘truth.’ Using receiver operator characteristic (ROC) analysis, an area under the ROC curve of 0.996 was obtained, demonstrating good correspondence between the colour image processing and the singular values. The complex cell analysis indicated a ‘texture angle’ expected from human inspection