Cutting Techniques in the Fish Industry: A Critical Review

Abstract

Fish and fishery products are among the most important sources of nutritional components for human health, including high-quality proteins, essential vitamins, minerals, and healthy polyunsaturated fatty acids. Fish farming and processing technologies are continuously evolving to improve and enhance the appearance, yield, and quality of fish and fish products from farm to fork throughout the fish supply chain, including growth, postharvest, treatment, storage, transportation, and distribution. Processing of fish involves a period of food withdrawal, collection and transportation, the process of stunning, bleeding, chilling, cutting, packaging, and byproduct recycling. Cutting is a set of crucial operations in fish processing to divide the whole fish into smaller pieces for producing fish products (e.g., fish fillets, steaks, etc.). Various techniques and machinery have been introduced in the field to advance and automate cutting operations. This review aims to provide a comprehensive review of fish cutting techniques, machine vision and artificial intelligence applications, and future directions in fish industries. This paper is expected to stimulate research on enhancing fish cutting yield, product diversity, safety and quality, as well as providing advanced solutions for engineering problems encountered in the fish industry.

Re‐evaluation of certain aspects of the EFSA Scientific Opinion of April 2010 on risk assessment of parasites in fishery products, based on new scientific data. Part 1: ToRs1–3

“…These have been covered in several reviews (e.g. Della Morte et al., 2023 ; Franssen et al., 2019 ; Fu et al., 2023 ; Kuchta et al., 2015 ; Liu et al., 2022 ; Martínez et al., 2023 ; Pozio et al., 2013 ; Tavares‐Dias, 2018 ; Valero et al., 2015 ).…”

“…In traditional fish processing, the operations are performed manually by experienced workers. Due to the advancement of cutting techniques in fish processing, advanced techniques for intelligent cutting and/or processing solutions are becoming available (Fu et al., 2023 ; Liu et al., 2022 ). Among them, gutting, which involves cutting and removing the viscera by washing out with water, extraction with claws or vacuum suction has a high importance in the removal of parasites, and is, for some species of high economic value, the first step that can be fully automated (Azarmdel et al., 2021 ).…”

Processing and Preservation of Aquatic Products

“…Additionally, heavy metal food contamination is expected under an aqueous medium when a metal knife is used. In recent years, novel techniques (such as waterjet cutting, machine vision, and artificial intelligence) have been invented to overcome the drawbacks of metal blade cutting, and to achieve higher cutting efficiency and quality [6].…”

Automating catfish cutting process using deep learning-based semantic segmentation

“…Machinery-based cutting technique is one of the most commonly used methods in traditional fish cutting to reduce the labor involvement. 6 Several different machines were often utilized to process the fish at specific processing stages. [7][8][9][10] While among all processing steps of catfish, de-heading, gutting, portioning, filleting, skinning, and trimming are the steps that still require repetitive laborious works.…”