A Proposal of Ultrasound Nondestructive Evaluation Method for Fish Meat Using Self-Organizing Map and Radial Basis Function Network

Abstract

Goal of our work is to develop a nondestructive evaluation support system for fish meat using ultrasound. The reason for using ultrasound is that not only can noninvasively and quantitatively evaluate fish in alive but also be expected to be able to directly evaluate fish swimming in the water. In previous works, we have proposed an evaluation method using the integrated backscatter (IB) method applied in the intra-vascular ultrasound. Moreover, we have shown that the it is possible to quantify evaluate the fat content and the texture of the fish meat by using the IB method. However, the sufficient evaluation accuracy for the practical applications has not been obtained with the IB method. In this work, we propose a new nondestructive fish meat evaluating method composed of the self-organizing map and the radial basis function network. As a result of verifying the usefulness of the proposed method through experiments, the fat content and the texture of fish meat were estimated with high accuracy.