Characterization of fat-connective tissue size distribution in pre-sliced pork hams using multifractal analysis

Fat-connective tissue size distribution (FSD) in hams is a fundamental physical property for its quality assessment. FSD is related to the sensory properties such as texture, taste, quality of raw meat and visual appearance. In this paper we present a tool to carry out the multifractal analysis (MFA) of two-dimensional binary images of pre-sliced pork hams through the calculation of the f(α)-spectra, Rényi (Dq) dimensions, and associated statistical regressions and parameters. The application is presented for the structural characterization of FSD in three qualities of pork hams (high yield, medium yield and premium quality hams) using image sections of 512 × 512 pixels2 with a spatial resolution of 0.102 mm/pixel. MFA was carried out using the method of moments in the optimized box size range of 32-512 pixels for all the ham images using powers of 2, and estimating the probability distribution for moments ranging from −10 < q < 10 in steps of 0.5. The experimental results suggest that MFA has a discriminating effect among the three types of ham using the maximum entropy (Hmax∗) and correlation dimension D2. This investigation revealed the usefulness of the MFA dimensions as quantitative descriptors of texture analysis and pattern distributions of FSD in pre-sliced ham images.