Visible and near-infrared light transmission: A hybrid imaging method for non-destructive meat quality evaluation

Visual inspection of the amount of external marbling (intramuscular fat) on the meat surface is the official method used to assign the quality grading level of meat. However, this method is based exclusively on the analysis of the meat surface without any information about the internal content of the meat sample. In this paper, a new method using visible (VIS) and near-infrared (NIR) light transmission is used to evaluate the quality of beef meat based on the marbling detection. It is demonstrated that using NIR light in transmission mode, it is possible to detect the fat not only on the surface, as in traditional methods, but also under the surface. Moreover, in combining the analysis of the two sides of the meat simple, it is possible to estimate the volumetric marbling which is not accessible by visual methods commonly proposed in computer vision. To the best of our knowledge, no similar work or method has been published or developed. The experimental results confirm the expected properties of the proposed method and illustrate the quality of the results obtained.