Thresholding methods on MRI to evaluate intramuscular fat level on Iberian ham

Abstract

Thresholding techniques are the simplest and most widely used methods to automatically segments images. These are used to segment images into several regions. This paper works over two sets of Iberian ham images: images taken by a digital camera (CCD) and Magnetic Resonance images (MRI), in order to establish a comparative for the performance on each kind of images. A methodology to determine the intramuscular fat (IMF) level of Iberian ham using computer vision techniques has been developed, as an attempt to find an alternative methodology to the traditional and destructive methods. The correlation between the chemical data and the computer vision results have been established in the paper. The main conclusions of the work are that better results have been obtained for MRI, which do not require preprocessing methods. So, the proposed approach to determine the IMF level could be considered as an alternative to the traditional and destructive methods. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.