Geometric modelling of heterogeneous and complex foods

GOÑI, S. M.; PURLIS, E.

JOURNAL OF FOOD ENGINEERING

ELSEVIER SCI LTD

Año: 2010 vol. 97 p. 547 - 554

0260-8774

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.