Patent ID: 8260005

Claim:
A process for grading of meat such as bovine, porcine, sheep, poultry meat or others with no need to manipulate meat specimens, by means of a portable tool comprising an image-capturing device and an image analyzing method, wherein values of meat quality parameters including meat texture, intramuscular fat, and color are obtained due to management of data from a digitalized image of a meat specimen by an artificial neural network (ANN) system corresponding to a backpropagation type or one that can learn to convert data captured from the digitized image into data of other nature; and wherein the texture parameter of the meat specimen is obtained according to the following steps: capturing an image; segmenting said image, where said segmentation stage only selects areas representing meat, and discards any remaining elements to produce a meat image; dividing said image into several sub-images having the same size; calculating a wavelet transform for each sub-image, from which a vector of RMS values is obtained for each sub-image; and co-relating in the ANN backpropagation, which relates each vector to a shear force value; calculating the mean value of the shear force values obtained for each sub-image.