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a,b,d
a,*
a
INRA, UR1268 Biopolyme`res, Interactions et Assemblages, BP 71627, F-44316 Nantes, France
Laboratoire de Biophysique, UMR-INRA SCALE 1211, ENSIA, 1 av des Olympiades, 91744 Massy, France
c
Genie Physique et Mecanique des Materiaux, INPG, BP 46, 38402 Saint Martin dHe`res, France
d
Centre Technique de Conservation des Produits Agricoles, Rue Marcel Luquet, 32000 Auch, France
e
Science Computers Consultants, 8 Rue la Richelandie`re, Parc Giron 42100 St Etienne, France
Abstract
Six bread crumbs were prepared from three dierent recipes and three baking procedures. Images of crumb were acquired in 2D at a
macroscopic scale by using a at bed scanner (resolution 85 lm) and in 3D at a local scale by X-ray tomography (resolution 10 lm). The
cellular structure was assessed by mathematical morphology. 2D image analysis was completed by principal component analysis. The
rst principal component was found to reect crumb neness, in agreement with the mean cell size determined in 3D at a local scale.
3D mean cell wall size were about 220 lm and were not signicantly dierent. The second principal component was linked to the 2D
macroscopic heterogeneity of the crumb and to the macroscopic cell wall thickness. 2D images can be applied to the rapid control of
crumb grain and could be used to quantify the cellular structure for the calculation of mechanical properties.
2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Keywords: Bread crumb; Image analysis; X-ray tomography; Mathematical morphology; Image texture; Cell size
1. Introduction
Mechanical properties of baked products strongly
depend on their cellular structure (Scanlon & Zghal,
2001). Crumb grain, dened by the size, the distribution
and the shape of cells and cell wall thickness (Kamman,
1970) largely governs sensory properties (Baardseth,
Kvaal, Lea, Ellekjr, & Frgestad, 2000) and inuences
consumer purchase (Pyler, 1988). The characterisation of
crumb grain structure of baked products can be obtained
using imaging techniques. Among various devices, atbed
scanner, CCD camera and magnetic resonance imaging
were used to generate 2D images (Naito, Ishida, Takano,
Koizumi, & Kano, 2003; Rogers, Day, & Olewnik, 1995;
*
Corresponding author. Tel.: +33 2 40 6751 93; fax: +33 2 40 6750 84.
E-mail address: devaux@nantes.inra.fr (M.-F. Devaux).
0963-9969/$ - see front matter 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.foodres.2007.06.004
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of breads were probably responsible for the over-estimation of cell characteristics by this method. Gonzales-Barron
and Butler (2006) compared the k-means clustering algorithm to six other thresholding techniques and found substantial variations in crumb features such as cell
uniformity and void fraction according to threshold variations. Cell segmentation is probably not appropriate for
2D image analysis of the complex and non-uniform cellular
structure of baked products (Scanlon & Zghal, 2001).
The second approach is based on image texture analysis
directly applied on grey level images. Image texture can be
dened as the spatial distribution of grey levels and be
described as ne, smooth, coarse, grainy etc. Images displaying small cells produce frequent grey level changes
and therefore a ne texture, while those with large cells
generate a coarser texture. Several techniques have been
applied to quantify image textures resulting from various
crumb grain structures. Images of French breads crumb
manufactured with dierent surfactants were classied
using six texture characteristics extracted by two-dimensional Haar transform (Bertrand, Le Guerneve, Marion,
Devaux, & Robert, 1992). Zayas (1993) determined the
neness of crumb from commercial breads by analysis of
a (64)2 pixel subimages of a whole slice. Rogers et al.
(1995) extracted features from the frequency domain, by
processing sub-images of bread slice to characterise crumb
neness and crumb cell elongation. They compared their
results with expert crumb scores. Kvaal, Wold, Indahl,
Baardseth, and Ns (1998) compared dierent methods
of extracting features from images and tested their ability
to predict the porosity of wheat baguettes. Although all
these features were suitable to predict sensory properties,
results are somewhat dicult to interpret because their
physical meaning is not clear. Rouille et al. (2005) evaluated crumb grain of French breads manufactured with different ours, by a granulometric method using grey level
mathematical morphology. The morphological operators
used, i.e. erosion, dilation and their combination, opening
and closing, modify images according to the size and intensity of bright and dark regions. The method made possible
to dene a crumb neness index, related to cell size. All
these studies show that image texture analysis has potential
for determining some cellular structural features, whilst
avoiding thresholding and cell segmentation.
The analysis of bread cellular structure from 2D images
is limited because cells are truncated due to bread sectioning. Visualisation of bread structure in 3D can eliminate
this drawback and show the connection of cells. Recently,
magnetic resonance imaging with a spatial resolution of
100 100 lm2 and slice thickness from 0.25 to 0.4 mm
was applied to non-frozen and frozen dough and breads
with a measuring time of 20 min by Naito et al. (2003).
X-ray tomography can provide high quality 3D images of
cellular structure of food foam products, thanks to the
strong contrast between void and matter within the material (Lim & Barigou, 2004; Trater, Alavi, & Rizvi, 2005).
Falcone et al. (2005) analysed two crumb samples
Water
Sucrose
Oil
Loaf density
(g m3)
Solid material
density (g m3)
A
B
C
D1
D2
D3
60
65
55
55
2
10
15
2
2
10
2
10
0.21
0.33
0.40
0.24
0.26
0.26
1.18
1.21
1.26
1.20
1.18
1.18
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Fig. 2. Illustration of erosion and dilation treatments applied to crumb from bread dough D1 image shown in Fig. 1. First line: erosion and dilation of size
5, second line: erosion and dilation of step 15.
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objects, the walls in our case. This procedure actually estimates variations of cell wall thickness. The volumic means
of cell size and cell wall thickness were computed from
these distributions.
Image analysis procedures were developed at the GPM2
laboratory using ImageJ (Rasband, W.S., US National
Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland, USA, http://
rsb.info.nih.gov/ij/, 19972006) and Aphelion (ADCIS,
France) software.
4. Results and discussion
A range of bread crumbs was obtained with densities
varying from 0.21 to 0.40 g cm3 (Table 1). Breads A and
D had close values whereas larger densities were obtained
for recipes B and C, which had larger sucrose contents
(10 and 15% our content). This result may be explained
by the depressing role played by a large concentration of
sugar on yeast, due to osmotic constraints. Examples of
images obtained in 2D and 3D are given in Figs. 4 and 5.
Images in Fig. 4 show that cells and walls were nicely visualised by using a at scanner with a better resolution than
the one obtained in a previous study using a CCD camera
(Rouille et al., 2005). Images in Fig. 5 show sections
Fig. 4. Examples of scanned images of bread crumb samples. From top to bottom and left to right: breads A, B, C, D1, D2 and D3. All images are
represented at the same scale and size of image A was 15.0 8.9 cm.
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Fig. 5. Sections (7 7 mm2) of the 3D images obtained by X-ray tomography (ESRF-Grenoble) of the six bread crumb samples. From top to bottom and
left to right: breads A, B, C, D1, D2 and D3.
extracted from the 3D images obtained by X-ray tomography; they all displayed a good contrast between cells and
cell walls allowing cell segmentation.
Dierent cellular structures were obtained. Samples A
and D1 had crumbs with larger cells than the other samples
(Fig. 4). Some cells appeared opened and connected with
their neighbours. B and C had a ner cell structure with
smooth cell walls. D2 and D3 samples had also a ne cell
structure. 3D X-ray tomography images corresponded to
a smaller eld of view than 2D images. 7 7 mm2 examples
of sections are shown in Fig. 5. 3D resolution allows visualising cells as small as 30 lm. Connections between cells
were observed and, like 2D at scanner images, larger cells
were observed for samples A and D1.
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Table 2
Crumb grain features of breads obtained by image analysis
Name 2D image analysis 3D image analysis
A
B
C
D1
D2
D3
Mean
cell size
(mm)
Mean wall
thickness
(mm)
2.30
1.11
2.27
1.53
0.88
1.11
1.47
1.12
0.84
1.50
1.15
1.14
0.24
0.25
0.21
0.19
0.22
0.20
33
39
42
35
37
40
0.19
0.25
0.31
0.17
0.23
0.21
0.22
0.30
0.39
0.20
0.27
0.25
Fig. 7. First and second loadings corresponding to principal components 1 and 2 of the similarity map of the erosiondilation curves.
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that the resolution allows analysing cell size, cell shape and
also wall thickness. For instance, the smaller cells appeared
more spherical than the larger ones (Fig. 5). These 2D
images also suggest that most of the cells were separated
from each other. In fact, connection between cells was
investigated by 3D image analysis. The 3D connectivity
index computed by the ratio of the largest cell volume to
the total void volume, according to Babin et al. (2006),
was close to 100%. This result proved that cells were highly
connected to each other, i.e. bread crumbs had an open cellular structure. This result is not surprising when considering the large relative density values, which varied between
0.19 (A) and 0.31 (C) (Table 2). Crumb porosity, i.e. cell
volumic fraction, therefore varied between 0.81 and 0.69.
The connection of cells thus addresses a sterical constraint
since maximum random packing fraction is 0.68, for spherical shaped elements of the same size and arranged without
order.
Relative density values computed from 3D images were
compared to the loaf density measured by the rapeseed
method. Loaf density values were estimated from images
by multiplying the relative density value by the solid material density. This density (Table 1) was estimated by the
additive rule:
X
1=qs
ci =qsi
where ci and qsi were respectively the concentration and the
density of each component our, water, sucrose and oil
included in the bread, water content being measured after
baking. A good agreement (r2 = 0.91) was found between
the two sets of density values (Tables 1 and 2). This result
suggests that, at least from the density point of view, the
measurements made by X-ray tomography at local scale
(sample 1 cm3), were representative of the whole crumb.
Cell size volumic distributions were computed by morphological granulometry using closing operator for each
bread (Fig. 8). In the present case, the cells were highly connected, so the size analysed by closing actually corresponded to their smallest dimension, i.e. their breadth in
3D. Smallest cell sizes (<2 mm) were observed for crumb
C and B and largest ones (13.5 mm) for samples A and
D1, which reached the largest size values. In addition, size
distribution was narrower for sample C and B than for
sample A and D1. Samples D2 and D3 displayed intermediate features. The mean cell size was computed from the
distributions (Table 2). Values varied between 1.5 mm for
samples D1 and A and 0.84 mm for sample C.
Volumic distributions of wall thickness have been calculated by morphological granulometry by opening. This
method analyses the smallest dimension of the wall corresponding to the thickness. The curves (Fig. 9) were somewhat similar, with a large peak around 200 lm, spreading
to 500 lm. Mean values of cell wall thickness were reported
in Table 2 and ranged between 0.19 for sample D1 and
0.25 lm for sample B. Relative density was inversely correlated (r2 = 0.86) to mean cell size (Table 2) and was not
correlated to wall size. The presence of large cells led to a
low relative density value of the 3D images. Wall sizes
did not vary signicantly from one bread to another. In
other words, and contrarily to the results obtained when
adding ingredients with tensioactive properties (Rouille
et al., 2005), no ne cellular structure could be obtained
for crumbs of low density, under our experimental
conditions.
Overall, the orders of magnitude were within the same
range as those found by Falcone et al. (2005) for cell wall
sizes but somewhat larger for cell sizes than those found
by Scanlon and Zghal (2001), both for pan bread. In the
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