Quality evaluation by color grading
Quality grading of pork ham is done by inspector based on a color scale. Each country has its own color grades, and each consumer group has different taste. In the USA, there are four color grades for ham.
Color classes are of three kinds, the background, fat, and lean. The lean has evidently four different color. In this application a grade is applied to the ham with its percentage of each lean color class. A classifier was build with five color classes, one class for background and fat and a class for each color grade. The classifier used was the Bayes quadratic classifier in our software SPR.
It is evident that the percentage of each color class is sufficient to discriminate between the different grade of ham. Each standard slice of ham has a dominant class assigned to it, which is its grade.