Knowing the exact number of fruit and trees helps growers to make better decisions about how to manage their production in the orchard and prevent plant diseases. The current practice of yield estimation is to manually count fruit or flowers (before harvesting), which is a very time-consuming and costly process. Moreover it’s not practical for large orchards. It also doesn’t allow to make predictions of plant development in a more precise way and thus, to take appropriate preventive measures with regard to plant protection or stimulation of plant development, as well as to react correctly in business terms knowing the approximate potential of an orchard before its actual harvest. Thanks to the changes that have occurred in recent years in the field of image analysis methods and computational efficiency, it is possible to create solutions for automatic fruit counting on the recorded digital image. In our work we’ve proposed the architecture of the system for counting apples (fruit in orchards) which is based on methods related to: determining the position of the camera, obtaining the image, image analysis / counting objects in the image and making data available to the fruit grower. The research compared results from three image analysis methods that can be used to count apple trees. The proposed scheme is based on the use of smartphones equipped with a camera with the required image acquisition accuracy and accurate GNSS positioning.
Authors
Additional information
- DOI
- Digital Object Identifier link open in new tab 10.3390/s19112592
- Category
- Publikacja w czasopiśmie
- Type
- artykuł w czasopiśmie wyróżnionym w JCR
- Language
- angielski
- Publication year
- 2019
