Plucking Out Foul Fowl. Chen and his team at the U.S. Department of Agriculture in Beltsville, Md., have spent more than 10 years developing a system that can identify diseased chicken carcasses whizzing by on poultry-processing lines five times faster than a human inspector can.
The automated chicken-inspection system uses a spectrophotometer, a specialized imaging device, which shines wavelengths of light onto a one-square-inch area of a chicken. Software on a Windows computer analyzes the spectra that bounce off the chicken to determine whether it may be contaminated by systemic diseases, such as blood- borne infections. Another part of the system scans an entire chicken to detect tumors and bruises. On a high-speed line running at 180 birds per minute, the system is about 94% accurate. Several food producers are now testing a commercial version, which the USDA developed with poultry-processing equipment maker Stork Gamco.
Is a computerized noxious-chicken detector just a bit strange? Not to Chen, who says the system is badly needed by the industry. "This will help human inspectors improve their efficiency and, hopefully, their consistency," he says.
Do you have a weird project? E-mail us at baseline@ziffdavis.com.
Комментариев нет:
Отправить комментарий