Artificial Intelligence Empowered Multispectral Vision Based System for Non-Contact Monitoring of Large Yellow Croaker (Larimichthys crocea) Fillets

A non-contact method was proposed to monitor the freshness (based on TVB-N and TBA values) of large yellow croaker fillets (Larimichthys crocea) by using a visible and near-infrared hyperspectral imaging system (400–1000 nm). In this work, the quantitative calibration models were built by using feed-forward neural networks (FNN) and partial least squares regression (PLSR). In addition, it was established that using a regression coefficient on the data can be further compressed by selecting optimal wavelengths (35 for TVB-N and 18 for TBA). The results validated that FNN has higher prediction accuracies than PLSR for both cases using full and selected reflectance spectra. Moreover, our FNN based model has showcased excellent performance even with selected reflectance spectra with rp = 0.978, R2p = 0.981, and RMSEP = 2.292 for TVB-N, and rp = 0.957, R2p = 0.916, and RMSEP = 0.341 for TBA, respectively. This optimal FNN model was then utilized for pixel-wise visualization maps of TVB-N and TBA contents in fillets.