Location: Environmental Microbial & Food Safety Laboratory
Project Number: 8042-42000-021-022-S
Project Type: Non-Assistance Cooperative Agreement
Start Date: Aug 17, 2026
End Date: Aug 16, 2028
Objective:
The objective of this project is to advance the use of spectral and fluorescence-based imaging technologies for poultry food-safety and quality assessment. The work aims to validate contamination-detection models under commercial processing conditions, develop Contamination and Sanitization Inspection-Disinfection (CSID) technology-based imaging models for biofilm detection and bacterial-load prediction, and create imaging software to assess poultry wing-quality defects. These efforts support ARS’s mission to improve contamination detection, sanitation verification, and product-quality consistency in poultry-processing environments.
Approach:
Collect operational imaging data from poultry-processing plants to validate and refine fecal-contamination models; generate biofilm imaging datasets linked to microbiological counts for model development; and build machine-learning tools to classify wing-quality defects. Models and software will be evaluated for accuracy, utility, and integration into real-world processing environments.