10 August 2004 Red Meat - It's all to do with Image

It may seem strange that scientists are taking digital images of meat but it does have a serious purpose.

To compete on the international and domestic markets with other products and producers, it has become increasingly important for the New Zealand meat industry to ensure that only the highest quality meat is produced.

This is where the photographs come in. Scientists in the Meat Group and the Centre for Advanced Computational Solutions (C-fACs) at Lincoln University are developing a new technique for assessing meat quality using digital images.

Meegalla Chandraratne, a PhD candidate in Lincoln's Agricultural and Life Sciences Division has developed an objective method for assessing meat quality by taking advantage of recent advances in computer vision and related computational and statistical analysis.

"It is important that meat producers are able to meet consumer expectations by being able to consistently provide quality products," said Chandraratne.

Chandraratne's work involves using computer image technology to replace visually assessed parameters in lamb grading.

"Lamb carcasses are traditionally graded using a combination of carcass weights and visual assessment of carcass surface fat depth. This grading system is inadequate to serve today's market. Nowadays the trend is to process carcasses into primal and retail cuts. In future, the NZ lamb carcass classification system could provide higher payments for the high quality carcasses," said Chandraratne.

"The imaging system (where a camera is used for image acquisition and a computer is used for image analysis) can be used to determine the grade, the relative abundance of different components of meat (lean, marbling, external fat, etc.) and, more importantly, some eating quality (tenderness) characteristics."

If adopted, the advantages of this new method of assessing meat are that it is objective and consistent over long periods of time, is quicker, accurate and cost effective.

"As New Zealand is one of the world's major beef exporting countries as well as the world's largest exporter of sheep and goat meat," said Chandraratne, "being able to ensure consistency in the quality of meat going to the large overseas markets as well as the domestic market is crucial in order to compete against other products and suppliers."

Lincoln University staff involved in this project includes Professor Don Kulasiri and Dr Sandhya Samarasinghe from the Centre for Advanced Computational Solutions (C-fACs). This project is supervised by Professor of Biochemistry, Roy Bickerstaff and is part of on-going research at Lincoln University into quantifying meat quality parameters.

Ian Collins, Journalist, Lincoln University, Canterbury, New Zealand

Janette Busch, Technical Writer, Agriculture and Life Sciences Division, Lincoln University, Canterbury, New Zealand