Bread is inherently irregular in structure and therefore it is not straightforward to quantify its physical structure and quality. In this research, an image processing technique was applied to bread crumb digital images for color and texture analysis. On the other hand, hardness of samples was measured with a texture analyzer. Slices of Iranian bread enriched with soy flour at 4 different levels were scanned using a flatbed scanner. The images were saved in TIFF format. The center of each slice was cropped in a square of 500*500 pixels and converted to grey-level image. A set of 96 images that presented a wide range of porosity, crumb coarsness and crumb hetrogeneity was evaluated. Color of images were determined in L*a*b color space. Mean cell area and void fraction were extracted from the images with ImageJ software. The results showed the effects of formulations and storage of bread crumb on these morphological features.

Keywords