Non-Destructive Detection of Chilled Mutton Freshness Using a Dual-Branch Hierarchical Spectral Feature-Aware Network

Precise detection of meat freshness levels is essential for food consumer safety and real-time quality monitoring. This study aims to achieve the high-accuracy freshness detection of chilled mutton freshness by integrating hyperspectral imaging with deep learning methods. Although hyperspectral data can effectively capture changes in mutton freshness, sparse raw spectra require optimal data processing strategies to minimize redundancy. Therefore, this study employs a multi-stage data processing approach to enhance the purity of feature spectra. Meanwhile, to address issues such as overlapping feature categories, imbalanced sample distributions, and insufficient intermediate features, we propose a Dual-Branch Hierarchical Spectral Feature-Aware Network (DBHSNet) for chilled mutton freshness detection. First, at the feature interaction stage, the PBCA module addresses the drawback that global and local branches in a conventional dual-branch framework tend to perceive spectral features independently. By enabling effective information exchange and bidirectional flow between the two branches, and injecting positional information into each spectral band, the model’s awareness of sequential spectral bands is enhanced. Second, at the feature fusion stage, the task-driven MSMHA module is introduced to address the dynamics of freshness variation and the accumulation of different metabolites. By leveraging multi-head attention and cross-scale fusion, the model more effectively captures both the overall spectral variation trends and fine-grained feature details. Third, at the classification output stage, dynamic loss weighting is set according to training epochs and relative losses to balance classification performance, effectively mitigating the impact of insufficiently discriminative intermediate features. The results demonstrate that the DBHSNet enables a more precise assessment of mutton freshness, achieving up to 7.59% higher accuracy than conventional methods under the same preprocessing conditions, while maintaining superior weighted metrics. Overall, this study offers a novel approach for mutton freshness detection and provides valuable support for freshness monitoring in cold-chain meat systems.