July 10, 2020 — Sushi is only as good as the fish wrapped inside its barrel of rice and seaweed. If the tuna, yellowtail, or salmon isn’t fresh, it not only looks gross, but renders the whole roll underwhelming in flavor and texture.
To keep things from getting fishy, a Japanese company has developed a new mobile app that uses artificial intelligence to grade the freshness of cuts of tuna on sight. Aptly named Tuna Scope, the system uses thousands of cross-sectional images of tuna tails as training data to learn what good quality tuna looks like.
According to the Tuna Scope website, trained fishmongers use the tuna tail as a “road map” detailing the fish’s flavor, texture, freshness, and overall excellence. Traditionally, master tuna merchants look at things like color and sheen, firmness, and the layering of fat to set fish prices. The silkier the meat looks, the better it probably tastes.
“The goal behind the development of this system was to pass down skills in the field of tuna evaluation, an area with a serious shortage of successors,” Dentsu, the Tokyo-based digital marketing company that led development of the app, said in a press release.