Multi-task convolutional neural network for simultaneous monitoring of lipid and protein oxidative damage in frozen-thawed pork using hyperspectral imaging

Lipid and protein oxidation are the main causes of meat deterioration during freezing. Traditional methods using hyperspectral imaging (HSI) need to train multiple independent models to predict multiple attributes, which is complex and time-consuming. In this study, a multi-task convolutional neural network (CNN) model was developed for visible near-infrared HSI data (400-1002 nm) of 240 pork samples treated with different freeze-thaw cycles (0-9 cycles) to evaluate the feasibility of simultaneously monitoring lipid oxidation (thiobarbituric acid reactive substance content) and protein oxidation (carbonyl content) in pork. The performance of the commonly used partial least squares regression (PLSR) model based on the spectra after pre-processing (Standard normal variate, Savitzky-Golay derivative, and Savitzky-Golay smoothing) and feature selection (Regression coefficients) and single-output CNN model was compared. The results showed that the multi-task CNN model achieved the optimal prediction accuracies for lipid oxidation (R2p = 0.9724, RMSEP = 0.0227, and RPD = 5.2579) and protein oxidation (R2p = 0.9602, RMSEP = 0.0702, and RPD = 4.6668). In final, the changes of lipid and protein oxidation of pork in different freeze-thaw cycles were successfully visualized. In conclusion, the combination of HSI and multi-task CNN method shows the potential of end-to-end prediction of pork oxidative damage. This study provides a new, convenient and automated technique for meat quality detection in the food industry.