Enhanced Fish Freshness Classification with Incremental Handcrafted Feature Fusion
This provides an incremental improvement for the food industry's need for objective, automated fish freshness monitoring.
The paper tackled the problem of automated fish freshness assessment by proposing a handcrafted feature fusion approach, achieving 77.56% accuracy (14.35% improvement over baseline) and up to 97.16% accuracy with data augmentation.
Accurate assessment of fish freshness remains a major challenge in the food industry, with direct consequences for product quality, market value, and consumer health. Conventional sensory evaluation is inherently subjective, inconsistent, and difficult to standardize across contexts, often limited by subtle, species-dependent spoilage cues. To address these limitations, we propose a handcrafted feature-based approach that systematically extracts and incrementally fuses complementary descriptors, including color statistics, histograms across multiple color spaces, and texture features such as Local Binary Patterns (LBP) and Gray-Level Co-occurrence Matrices (GLCM), from fish eye images. Our method captures global chromatic variations from full images and localized degradations from ROI segments, fusing each independently to evaluate their effectiveness in assessing freshness. Experiments on the Freshness of the Fish Eyes (FFE) dataset demonstrate the approach's effectiveness: in a standard train-test setting, a LightGBM classifier achieved 77.56% accuracy, a 14.35% improvement over the previous deep learning baseline of 63.21%. With augmented data, an Artificial Neural Network (ANN) reached 97.16% accuracy, surpassing the prior best of 77.3% by 19.86%. These results demonstrate that carefully engineered, handcrafted features, when strategically processed, yield a robust, interpretable, and reliable solution for automated fish freshness assessment, providing valuable insights for practical applications in food quality monitoring.