Identifying the quality characteristics of pork floss structure based on deep learning framework

Pork floss is a traditional Chinese food with a long history. Nowadays, pork floss is known to consumers as a leisure food. It is made from pork through a unique process in which the muscle fibers become flaky or granular and tangled. In this study, a deep learning-based approach is proposed to detect the quality characteristics of pork floss structure. Describe that the experiments were conducted using widely recognized brands of pork floss available in the grocery market, omitting the use of abbreviations. A total of 8000 images of eight commercially available pork flosses were collected and processed using sharpening, image gray coloring, real-time shading correction, and binarization. After the machine learning model learned the features of the pork floss, the images were labeled using a manual mask. The coupling of residual enhancement mask and region-based convolutional neural network (CRE-MRCNN) based deep learning framework was used to segment the images. The results showed that CRE-MRCNN could be used to identify the knot features and pore features of different brands of pork floss to evaluate their quality. The combined results of the models based on the sensory tests and machine vision showed that the pork floss from TC was the best, followed by YJJ, DD and HQ. This also shows the potential of machine vision to help people recognize the quality characteristics of pork floss structure.