Adulteration detection in minced beef using low-cost color imaging system coupled with deep neural network

Major processed meat products, including minced beef, are one of the favorite ingredients of most people because they are high in protein, vitamins, and minerals. The high demand and high prices make processed meat products vulnerable to adulteration. In addition, eliminating morphological attributes makes the authenticity of minced beef challenging to identify with the naked eye. This paper aims to describe the feasibility study of adulteration detection in minced beef using a low-cost imaging system coupled with a deep neural network. The proposed method was expected to be able to detect minced beef adulteration. There were 500 captured images of minced beef samples. Then, there were 24 color and textural features retrieved from the image. The samples were then labeled and evaluated. A deep neural network (DNN) was developed and investigated to support classification. The proposed DNN was also compared to six machine learning algorithms in the form of accuracy, precision, and sensitivity of classification. The feature importance analysis was also performed to obtain the most impacted features to classification results. The DNN model classification accuracy was 98.00% without feature selection and 99.33% with feature selection. The proposed DNN has the best performance with individual accuracy of up to 99.33%, a precision of up to 98.68%, and a sensitivity of up to 98.67%. This work shows the enormous potential application of a low-cost imaging system coupled with DNN to rapidly detect adulterants in minced beef with high performance.