Design and Experiment of a 3D Laser-Based Pork Rib Cutting System

Accurate portioning of bone-in pork ribs remains challenging because of their curved geometry, uneven meat thickness, and irregular bone–meat distribution. To address this issue, we developed a semi-automatic two-stage pork rib cutting system based on 3D line laser scanning. In the first stage, inter-rib seams were identified from the point cloud of a whole rib rack to determine cutting positions. The separated rib strips were then manually reloaded, aligned, and rescanned. In the second stage, skeleton curves were extracted and adaptive equal-arc-length cutting positions were generated within a preset range of 40–50 mm. The segmentation method was evaluated on 20 independent pork rib racks and achieved mean precision, recall, F1-score, and overall accuracy values of 0.936, 0.918, 0.927, and 0.931, respectively. In the cutting experiment, three racks containing 32 rib strips produced 163 final portions. The pooled rib-seam cutting success, length qualification, bone fracture, and overall cutting success rates were 89.66%, 89.57%, 5.52%, and 87.73%, respectively. The operating cycle time was approximately 120 s per rack, corresponding to a nominal throughput of 30 racks h−1. These results indicate that the system can identify rib seams and produce uniform portions, providing a feasible approach for semi-automatic processing of bone-in pork ribs.