On-Line Automated Inspection of Poultry Carcasses by Machine Vision

Development of an automated poultry inspection system that is low-cost, operates with minimum human intervention, and is able to maintain its accuracy is important to the U.S. Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) and the poultry industry. Such a system, placed strategically in the processing plants, would help improve the inspection speed, minimize problems of human error and variability, improve the effectiveness of the federal inspection program, and increase the slaughter plants’ productivity. This paper describes an automated poultry inspection system that utilizes machine vision technology. The system was tested on-line at a poultry plant. The results showed that the classification accuracy for wholesome and unwholesome carcasses were 94 and 87%, respectively.