Rapid nondestructive evaluation of duck meat pH and color using visible and near-infrared reflectance spectroscopy

In the present study, visible and near-infrared reflectance spectroscopy were applied to predict quality attributes of duck breast meat. The real color (expressed as lightness, redness, and yellowness) and pH of duck samples were recorded using traditional contact methods and then modeled with their corresponding spectral data by partial least square regression. Before the establishment of prediction models, three different spectral preprocessing methods including first derivative, standard normalized variate, and Savitzky–Golay smoothing were used. Compared to the models obtained from original spectral data set, the predictive capabilities of models based on the spectra after preprocessing were improved effectively. As a result, the determination coefficient of calibration set and prediction set of the best models for lightness, redness, yellowness, and pH parameters were 0.96 and 0.85, 0.94 and 0.94, 0.96 and 0.94, 0.81 and 0.76, respectively. Results demonstrated that visible and near-infrared spectroscopy can become a useful tool for rapid prediction of duck color and pH quality attributes.