Marel IRIS Fillet Inspection (FI) camera solution

The Marel IRIS Fillet Inspection (FI) camera solution is used for the quality assurance of chicken fillets. The camera provides a visual quality assessment that can detect defects such as bruises, fat and skin.

In a processing plant, a typical fillet line will feature a deboning system, a trimming station and a bone scanner. Additionally, the FI camera solution can be installed after the trimming station to check in real time whether the trimmed fillets on the conveyor belt meet with the user’s quality requirements. If trimming is done too intensely, too much valuable meat weight will be downgraded, whereas if the trimming is too mild, it could lead to complaints and a lower order intake.

For fillet inspection, it is easy to set the system’s allowed tolerance threshold for individual bruises, total bruise area, fat defects and total fat area. Deviant fillet shapes can also be taken into account. Among the fat defects, residual skin — not removed by a skinner — is also detected. Detected bruises can be subcutaneous bleedings or blood clots — visible as sharp, red dots that can simply be wiped off. As a result of inferior wing separation, the wing pit is notably a critical spot where several defects may occur, such as blood spots or remaining tendons. On the other hand, too enthusiastic trimming in this area will result in odd fillet shapes and too much good meat spoiled.

IRIS Fillet Inspection can be combined with Innova distribution software and a fillet distribution system, allowing it to filter out the products that don’t meet the criteria.

The camera and the software cooperate in assigning a certain quality to the fillets and this quality information can be used for decision-making for downstream distribution.