Real‐time quantitative detection of hydrocolloid adulteration in meat based on Swin Transformer and smartphone

Abstract Hydrocolloids are widely used in meat products as common food additives. However, research has indicated that excessive consumption of these hydrocolloids may have potential health implications. Currently, consumers mainly rely on sensory evaluation to identify hydrocolloid adulteration in meat products. Although many studies on quantitative detection of hydrocolloids have been conducted by biochemical methods in laboratory environments, there is currently a lack of effective tools for consumers and regulators to obtain real‐time and reliable information on hydrocolloid adulteration. To address this challenge, a smartphone‐based computer vision method was developed to quantitatively detect carrageenan adulteration in beef in this work. Specifically, Swin Transformer models, along with pre‐training and fine‐tuning techniques, were used to successfully automate the classification of beef into nine different levels of carrageenan adulteration, ranging from 0% to 20%. Among the tested models, Swin‐Tiny (Swin‐T) achieved the highest trade‐off performance, with a Top‐1 accuracy of 0.997, a detection speed of 3.2 ms, and a model size of 103.45 Mb. Compared to computer vision, the electrochemical impedance spectroscopy achieved a lower accuracy of 0.792 and required a constant temperature environment and a waiting time of around 30 min for data stabilization. In addition, Swin‐T model was also capable of distinguishing between different types of hydrocolloids with a Top‐1 accuracy of 0.975. This study provides consumers and regulators with a valuable tool to obtain real‐time quantitative information about meat adulteration anytime, anywhere. Practical Application This research provides a practical solution for regulators and consumers to non‐destructively and quantitatively detect the content and type of hydrocolloids in beef in real‐time using smartphones. This innovation has the potential to significantly reduce the costs associated with meat quality testing, such as the use of chemical reagents and expensive instruments.