Geometric modelling of heterogeneous and complex foods Original Research Article

A procedure to obtain realistic geometric models of foods having different inner tissues or sub-regions is developed. The proposed methodology consists in colour segmentation of food images using a distance criterion, obtaining a reduced set of pixels representing univocally all boundaries of food sub-regions, and finally construction of the geometric model through linear interpolation. The procedure was applied to samples of different nature and complexity. The geometric models were assessed in two different ways, i.e. evaluating the performance of the image segmentation step and simulating a chilling process. The former provided an objective assessment while the later verified the usefulness of the geometric models. An optimized scenario was found between the approximation degree of the food boundaries and the computational resources involved in process simulation. Furthermore, the presented procedure can be used to perform food quality evaluation.