FRACTAL FEATURE ANALYSIS OF BEEF MARBLING PATTERNS

摘要

The purpose of this study is to investigate fractal behavior of beef marbling patterns and to explore relationships between fractal dimensions and marbling scores. Authors firstly extracted marbling images from beef rib-eye cross-section images using computer image processing technologies and then implemented the fractal analysis on these marbling images based on the pixel covering method. Finally box-counting fractal dimension (BFD) and informational fractal dimension (IFD) of one hundred and thirty-five beef marbling images were calculated and plotted against the beef marbling scores. The results showed that all beef marbling images exhibit fractal behavior over the limited range of scales accessible to analysis. Furthermore, their BFD and IFD are closely related to the score of beef marbling, suggesting that fractal analyses can provide us a potential tool to calibrate the score of beef marbling.